[Fedora-packaging] New Mono Page for new guidelines

[Paul Howarth]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 09:46 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
>> The guidelines now say "no noarch packages". What about packages such as
>> lat, that are already in Extras as noarch and don't contain any
>> arch-specific AOTs?
>>
> The meeting log mentions that there are probably very few packages that
> contain pre-built AOTs (as opposed to glue-libraries which plainly go
> into %{_libdir}).  The problem resides in the fact that the system
> administrator can choose to compile AOTs after installation of the
> package.  Due to the fact that mono will only find AOTs that are in the
> same directory as the .dlls, the directory that the .dlls are in has to
> be the right one for an ELF shared object on that platform.  This
> means /usr/lib for x86 and /usr/lib64 for x86_64.
> 
>> It does, however, install an mcs-built .dll and .exe in %{_prefix}/lib.
>>
> It would need to be changed to %{_libdir} and non-noarch.  The contents
> of the lat package may well be arch independent but doing this seems to
> be the least evil course to pursue WRT mono's limitations.  This is also
> one of the issues that caused Debian to move mono from /usr/share
> to /usr/lib.
> 
>> Is there anything technically wrong with this other than not lining up
>> with the guidelines?
> 
> Hopefully the first paragraph explained that.  If so, I'll try to merge
> that explanation into the guidelines.

Thanks for the explanation. I think it's very useful for guidelines to 
include the rationale behind them. It helps people to understand them 
and is also useful in determining whether an exception to the guidelines 
should be made, or indeed if the guidelines need updating to cover some 
case that hadn't been considered before.

I've now updated lat to use %{_libdir} instead of %{_prefix}/lib and be 
arch-specific:

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/lat/lat.spec?root=extras&rev=1.5&view=markup

Paul.