[Fedora-packaging] Question about how libgcj-devel requires zlib

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2008, seth vidal wrote:

> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 15:27 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 14:29 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
>>
>>> If you'd like to lead a crusade to get rid of them I'll happily follow
>>> but seeing as I've tried it twice I'm not going to lead another one :)
>>
>> In this case, wouldn't it be something that we could use the new rpm
>> isa-provides for?
>>
>> Requires: zlib-devel(x86-32)
>>
>> Of course, that doesn't seem to be working right now in rawhide... but I
>> think all we'd need to do is rebuild zlib.
>>
>
> indeed - except we'd have to make that work per-arch b/c zlib-devel
> (x86-32) isn't going to work so well on ppc64

Well obviously you don't want to use literal, hardcoded "Requires: 
zlib-devel(x86-32)" in the spec, but this instead:

Requires: zlib-devel%{?_isa}

That gets expanded at build time to the ISA name of the package being 
built. And it's backwards compatible in the sense that if built with older 
rpm, you get just "Requires: zlib-devel" like before.

And yes this is one of the major cases for which the whole ISA-thingie was 
invented. What's missing is the mass-rebuild to make the ISA-provides 
globally available, and FPC guidelines on using them.

 	- Panu -