[Fedora-packaging] Scripting language dependencies

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 09:16:40AM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jon Masters (jcm at redhat.com) said: 
> > I hope everyone is having a good day. Here in the Fedora ARM project,
> > we're having a great time overall, but we've run up against a familiar
> > foe in our preparation for Fedora 17 and rawhide: superfluous deps in
> > SPEC files. Today's example is a shell-escaped call to Ruby just to
> > determine some gcc flags for an unrelated package build, but that's just
> > today's example. There are many others, so some standard would help.
> 
This isn't codified in current Guidelines that I know of.  I do recall one
thread on it from the very early days of Fedora (possibly before the FPC).

> OK, so how about:
> 
> ...
> Scripting inside of spec files
> 
> Inside of a spec file, sometimes it is necessary to call a programming or
> scripting language during %setup, %build, or %install. In Fedora, spec
> files may in general only use the following languages for this purpose:
> 
> 1. Python
> 2. Perl
> 3. awk/sed
> 
> Also, if your package already BuildRequires a specific scripting language
> (such as Ruby, or Tcl) as part of its normal compile process, it may also be
> called from the spec file.
> 
That seems about right.  Maybe be a little looser and allow using languages
that are either BuildRequires or Requires already.

For instance, take a language that doesn't byte compile itself.  If you had
a package where upstream consists of a single file that you then have to cp
to the right filesystem location  to become a module for that language it
wouldn't need the interpreter to compile.  However, the best way to
determine the filesystem location might be something like::
  "foolanguage -e 'print libpath'"

It seems appropriate to use that in a spec file.

Also, #3 might be better if it was a little more vague::

"Standard programs used in shell programming, for instance awk and sed"

Another clarificaation might be to make the initial paragraph a little more
specific:

"Sometimes it is necessary to write a short script (perhaps a one-liner)
that's executed in  %setup, %build, or %install to get some information
about the build environment.  In Fedora, spec files may in general only use
the following languages for this purpose: [...]"

-Toshio
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