How does this work when maintaining packages that need to go 1:1 from Factory to old products like SLES 12 SP5 and SLES 15 SPx? Do I need to keep both the "old" update-alternatives piceces in the spec file and the "new" libalternatives one with %if %{suse_version}?
Yes, in this case we need to maintain compatibility with both codestreams with a single spec file, so that'd be the approach.
Note I also see in binutils # disable libalternatives for now until it's changed to not # introduce cmake/cunit-tests into the bootstrap cycle %if 0 && 0%{?suse_version} > 1500 %bcond_without libalternatives %else %bcond_with libalternatives %endif how do we address this? Richard.
This, in particular, is easily solved. I just did a build last night of libalternatives that doesn't require cunit-tests. CMake, yes. cunit-tests, no. With RPM 4.19 migrating to CMake, as Neal mentioned further down this ML, it might become part of the bootstrap dependencies for Factory/Tumbleweed/SLE16. So we can remove this cunit-tests dependency from upstream libalternatives (at least for a minimal build), and I'd say it's solved.