%{?dist}, recommended or optional?
Michael Schwendt
bugs.michael at gmx.net
Sun Jan 8 14:54:28 UTC 2006
On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 13:02:27 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 12:56 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 23:18 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > Shall I go on? I still fail to see where you see a contradiction.
> >
> > Perhaps it's just my bad English and the way different people think
> > about "contradiction".
>
> Okay, I guess I now found it. It's perhaps my experience with standards.
> In the standards world, there is this thing called RFC 2119 (and similar
> documents), which defines "SHOULD" and "RECOMMENDED" to be different
> from "MAY" and "OPTIONAL". The RFC can be found here:
>
> http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.html
>
> SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
> may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
> particular item, but the full implications must be understood
> and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
>
> MAY This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is
> truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item
> because a particular marketplace requires it or because the
> vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor
> may omit the same item. [...]
>
> That's all that's confusing.
Well, conclusively %{?dist} is an optional macro which is recommended
by its lobbyists. ;-P
This is splitting-hairs. I believe the terminology in RFCs is defined
more strictly in order to avoid interoperability problems of different
implementations. %{?dist}, being the least-significant portion of
a package EVR number, is not so important. For all those packagers,
who use or prefer a different release versioning scheme, it is truely
optional. Whether carefully weighing the implications of using it or
not using it is required, I don't know. It doesn't add a lot of
complicated magic.
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