[Fedora-packaging] PHP packaging policy notes

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

I think we need to get moving on this; I'd hope to have something
which has at least some chance of passing by the next meeting.

For PEAR modules, we currently have this proposal:

http://tkmame.retrogames.com/fedora-extras/spectemplate-pear.spec

which still suffers from excess macroization (%{__rm} and other such
horrors) but otherwise looks pretty good.  We still need to decide
whether php-pear-X should really provide php-X.  At this point I'd
vote against.

It looks like the :MODULE_COMPAT thing is a non-starter, so PHP
packagers will just have to deal with incompatibilities that silently
crop up.


For PECL modules, I haven't seen much discussion.  What needs to
happen here?

For extensions like php-shout and other packages like php-Smarty, we
really don't have any guidelines at all, and we need some.

I'm not familiar enough with the issues to even know where to start.
Both PECL and plain extensions seem to need a couple of defines; the
existing php-pecl-apc package (which somehow was approved recently for
Extras) uses these:

%define php_extdir %(php-config --extension-dir 2>/dev/null || echo %{_libdir}/php4)
%define php_apiver %((echo %{default_apiver}; php -i 2>/dev/null | sed -n 's/^PHP API => //p') | tail -1)

The second could use a bit of explanation, I think.

 - J<