Core Packages in Violation of the Fedora Naming Guidelines

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 19:22:51 +0100, Jose' Matos wrote:

> On Thursday 13 July 2006 19:13, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > > I think you misunderstood me but anyway : how do you rebuild a package
> > > for a different dist, without any changes in the src.rpm contents, if
> > > it's been restricted to a specific dist via R or BR ?
> >
> > That's the point (I think), you don't.  That's why the R/BR restrictions
> > were put in place.
> 
>   The package names present in Requires and BuildRequires depend on the 
> distribution for which you are building.
> 
>   That is why if you want to port some rpm spec from Mandriva to Fedora, or 
> the other way around, you have to change those names (and eventually delete 
> and/or add others).
> 
>   So it is not possible to use the original src.rpm unchanged, that was the 
> point, I think. :-)

Plus, there may be patches in the src.rpm which are dist-specific. It may
or may not be possible [in rather ugly ways] to express the dist-requirements
in explicit and versioned R (or BR) by guessing maximum versions or by
introducing deps on specific versions. Broken explicit deps are particularly
bad, avoid them like the plague! We see them regularly in the broken deps
reports. Bad, bad, bad.

Further, the unmodified src.rpm may build fine for a newer dist, but
that's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to create and ship tested
and working binaries, prepared by the package maintainer(s), and which if
rebuilt without modification do not pretend that they have been made for
the different dist.

All I suggest is, don't limit packagers' freedom. When I know that %dist
expands to .fc4, I ought to be permitted to use .fc4 in my spec.

Anyway, this debate has found an end for me at this point. Keep fighting
for no visible benefit. Seeing a big thread about jpackage Release hacks,
I'm not going to voice my opinion on this any longer. %{?dist} is not
mandatory, and hence the work-around is to not use any dist tag at all
and to forbid anybody who modifies the spec to add %{?dist} without
prior permission.