Michal Vyskocil wrote:
Can't we simply adopt the Fedora doc and make it a cross-distribution documentation? (we might have some differences, but I'm sure we can drop some, and work with Fedora people on a good way to highlight the differences)
If Fedora would be interested, why not. I'm afraid that this would be better, but rather impossible way. Stanislav Brabec told me about his effort on unification of RPM macros used by various distributions, but it failed. It failed on a simple reason - no one want to change his policy/macros/etc. I CCing him, so he should be able provide more details about current state of discussion on rpm-devel (or rpm-maint, I'm not sure) mailing list.
The effort silently disappeared. Going deeper to document any of the details, you find more and more differences introduced by a different solution implemented in past and different target. http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/2008-July/002210.html Such effort would be welcome on both sides, but everybody should realize an extreme amount of work needed for this effort. Due to manual-work nature of spec files, there is no easy way to adopt packages to any unified conventions. Unification means changes of nearly all macros, and definition of new macros to define new different aspects of particular distros (whether to call autoreconf or not,...), then manual modification of _all_ packages. Here is my blind guess: When both Fedora and Novell hire two new employees dedicated to this work, unified spec files of our packages may be ready in say 2 years. - Several man-weeks of work to create the draft We have to create a document, which would be accepted by both sides. We need to target many particular aspects (autotools based stuff, perl stuff, python stuff, gnome, kde, gconf2, mime-database, icon-database, fonts, summary and description conventions and syntax, names of packages, unification migration conventions and migration protection...) - Several man-months of work to unify RPM implementation Our rpm implementation differs in important aspects. Redhat uses rpm 4.6, Novell did not even started to think about migration to it. We actually have rpm 4.4 with 61 patches, custom macros. We have to evaluate, how many packages will need spec file changes after migration to the new rpm. However I believe, that rpm >4.6 may bring new power for zypp and even packages quality, the migration will be far from trivial. - Several man-years to modify all packages in openSUSE and Fedora. Example: Imagine, that %run_ldconfig was deprecated in SuSE several years ago, but it is still widely found in our packages. Exactly the same situation affect Shared Library Packaging Rules. Now multiply the amount of work (or time) to fix the whole distro by 5-10 and you are near to the spec file unification. P. S.: With a similar amount of work, we may think about migration to any of modern package-class based building tools or design a new build system from scratch: http://en.opensuse.org/BrainStorming_Prague/Way_we_do_packaging_is_ineffecti... It also means rewrite of package descriptions, but this approach would bring much more benefits in long-term than spec files unification. -- Best Regards / S pozdravem, Stanislav Brabec software developer --------------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s. r. o. e-mail: sbrabec@suse.cz Lihovarská 1060/12 tel: +420 284 028 966, +49 911 740538747 190 00 Praha 9 fax: +420 284 028 951 Czech Republic http://www.suse.cz/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org