On Fri, 2020-11-20 at 17:29 +0100, Richard Brown wrote:

I respectfully but strongly disagree.

Packaging is not static knowledge, and the requirements that packaging has to fufil is not static.

This article documents packaging changes which all happened as a result of requirements in Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Leap/Jump, SLE or other SUSE Products.

None of this was 'change for changes sake'.

If if you very narrow mindedly consider only what is clearly on the horizon for SLE, there is no avoiding change at the sort of level you see captured in this document.

On the contrary, I'd expect some to argue that all this change isn't enough and more significant, rapid, and invasive changes to how we package things to be necessary.

Sure thing. Some people say that rpm itself is obsolete 20th-century technology. We've had this discussion many times - outside the narrow world of rpm-based distros, hardly anyone cares about this stuff. I see this as voting-by-feet, at least in part. By changing the rules every other year, we make it harder than needs to be, and less likely that people will enjoy contributing to our project.

In such an environment, I find articles like this one put together by Vitezslav and Kristyna to be absolutely wonderful and like to encorage them to write more, at this level of detail, as often as they can.

I didn't say the article was bad. Quite to the contrary, it's a nice source of information. I'll make sure I bookmark it for the next time my packages fail some lint check (along these lines - why is document located on github rather than on the openSUSE Wiki, where people would primarily look for it? So far I didn't even find a reference on the Wiki). There's one point where the article falls short IMO, and that's backward compatibility. For each of the new macros, it should at least tell on which distros/service packs it is (or will be) available. I'm generally fine with changing my spec files, but I positively hate having to add conditionals because newer flavors require using macros that old ones don't have. Martin -- Dr. Martin Wilck , Tel. +49 (0)911 74053 2107 SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg GF: Felix Imendörffer