[Fedora-packaging] PHP guidelines

[Christopher Stone]

On 7/24/06, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
> So, is there still any interest in PHP guidelines at all?
>
> I worked up http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/PHP but then
> Ville had an idea for a template that doesn't need any special macro
> definitions to be provided by the php-pear package.  I don't know what
> the current state of things is.
>
> Is there any chance of making any forward movement soon?  We're going
> to start losing packagers if we can't get some reviews done soon.
>
> Regarding PECL modules, I looked over the php-pecl-xdebug package
> which is the only PECL module under review currently.  The spec is
> clean and requires two macros which I have in the above draft,
> although the means for determining the  API version is completely
> different.  Could someone comment on the differences and relative
> strengths of:
>
> %define php_apiver %((phpize --version 2>/dev/null || echo 'PHP Api Version: 20041225' ) | sed -n '/PHP Api Version/ s/.*:  *//p')
>
> and
>
> %define php_apiver  %((echo 0; php -i 2>/dev/null | sed -n 's/^PHP API => //p') | tail -1)
>
> besides the obvious additional complexity of the former (and the
> hilarity of having to do such gymnastics in the first place)?

Well Ville made a bunch of changes to the spec file template so that
it doesn't have to use macros.  It essentially complicates the default
spec template.  The reason for adding all of this additional
complexity is to support deprecated distributions.

Personally, I don't see the advantage to adding a bunch of extra stuff
to the spec files just to support FC4.

Also Ville insists on their being a %build section for an unknown
reason.  He claims people don't know what rpm does and not having a
%build will cause mysterious errors, when infact the rpm source code
clealy indicates the consequences of not using %build.  These
consequences to no affect php-pear modules, so I do not understand his
reasoning for wanting to add a %build section to the template.

The whole thing with the files section looks like a total hack to me
and I don't think we should be going through all this trouble just to
support FC4 which may not get the new macro definitions.