Packaging Committee Meeting Summary (2010-02-03)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 03 février 2010 à 18:33 -0500, Toshio Kuratomi a écrit :
> On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 11:48:52PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le mercredi 03 février 2010 à 23:46 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
> > > adf-accanthis-fonts is probably the most recent "complex" font package
> > > but I wouldn't vouch the declaration happens exactly in the same order
> > > in all font packages. The general pattern is the same but packagers have
> > > different tools and habits so slight variations exist.
> > 
> > Anyway here is one occurence of what I worried about in all its glory
> > 
> > http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=130814
> > 
> Yep.
> 
> So, while less than ideal from your standpoint of putting the definition of
> the subpackage together with the call to the macro, does rearranging things
> like this  do the trick?

That would probably avoid the koji display problem but is sure to
introduce packaging bugs. The macro call has been put in this particular
place because experience shows that reduces human mistakes. It's never
easy to do back and forths between two parts of the same file, but in
this case they are compounded by the kind of syntax forced on us by the
use of a macro. Everything needs to be cramed on a single line. Any
syntax error and things fail without proper error messages (I've tried
to add some debug output. I caused mock build to stop dead). You can not
do as many calls as you want (like you can for %doc) or rpm will
complain of multiple %posts or %files for the same subpackage (without
telling you exactly which subpackage fails)

The choice that was made was to minimize human error risk at the expense
of some prettiness in koji. I'd do the same choice today in a blink. We
are severely limited what the tools can do, but trying to accomodate
tools at all costs results in undue human burden and lots of bad
packages. Humans have limits too. 

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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