Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 08:01 +0000, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > A flag to rebuild the rpms with mono support I think would be OK -
> > except that means the core developers would have to maintain it, and I
> > don't know how easy that would be.
> 
> Nope. No flags. Nothing. rpm purity. If you had that sort of thing in
> there, you could equally have the flag in to support mp3 on xmms, mpegs
> for Totem and all the other bits Red Hat have played it safe on.

Well, Totem in Fedora does it via plugins - you don't have to rebuild
it, you just need to install additional gstreamer-plugins.

Some packages - like sox - will support mp3 with a simple rebuild
presuming the necessary devel packages are installed.

Passing flags to a spec file is pure rpm - via the --define switch.

I don't think they should go out of their way to do it in cases where
you can add the functionality with an add-on package that doesn't
conflict with core package. When they can't, as in freetype and the
bytecode interpreter, I don't think they need to but I don't think it is
a problem if they do.