[Fedora-packaging] PHP guidelines

[Ville Skyttä]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 18:26 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:

> Well Ville made a bunch of changes to the spec file template so that
> it doesn't have to use macros.

That's just a "food for thought" patch attached to Bugzilla (#198706)
for comments, not committed anywhere yet.

>   It essentially complicates the default
> spec template.  The reason for adding all of this additional
> complexity is to support deprecated distributions.

Such as FC5 as it stands now?  Shrug.

The initial suggested template hardcoded /usr/bin/pear scriptlet
dependencies, but actually used %{__pear} in them.  This is apparently
done to work around the case where even "make srpm" would fail if
%{__pear} is not defined (which would very likely result in eg. the
current FE buildsys not being able to build those packages for *any*
distro version without changes, because %{__pear} was not conditionally
defined in the specfile).  But the above workaround is broken
everywhere, including when %{__pear} is defined, and makes the whole
%{__pear} macro questionable.

There are several ways to fix the problem consistently.  As far as I can
tell, all of them include either conditionally defining %{__pear} in the
specfile and using it everywhere, or not using it at all and reverting
to %{_bindir}/pear or /usr/bin/pear instead and using that everywhere.

In addition to the above, it would be good to 1) buildrequire something
that defines rest of the used macros, or 2) conditionally define them in
the specfile, or 3) forget about the rest of the macros and use
something like the "food for thought" approach.  Until the macros are in
FC5, 1) (or not adding the BR) is a blocker for inclusion of the
template in rpmdevtools or a blocker for the new release of rpmdevtools
for FC5.  2) and 3) don't block anything, and would have the additional
benefit of working with earlier distro versions.

The package.xml issue mentioned in #198706 comment 3 needs some
attention too, and the comment contains a suggested fix.

I'm not going to spend any more time working on this.  Please just
provide patches you would like to see applied over the
spectemplate-php-pear.spec and newrpmspec in rpmdevtools CVS
("fedora-rpmdevtools" in the "fedora" (not extras) CVS root) to bug
198706 when you've figured out what it will be.

> Also Ville insists on their being a %build section for an unknown
> reason.

I did provide a reason, you seem to choose to ignore it.