[Fedora-packaging] [Proposal] Packaging guidelines/spec per version

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 09:57:12AM +0100, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 09:46 +0100, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> 
> > I shown in other thread that the "shared" .spec is not reality. Now even 
> > spec for F18 and F19 differs even if you did not touch them, since there 
> > was mass rebuild and spec has different revisions and changelog entries.
> 
> I respectfully disagree here, shared spec is a reality, lots of
> packagers use it, I do.

Yep, we use it extensively for maintaining libvirt related packages
and it is incredibly beneficial, reducing the burden of maintaining
multiple branches in parallel & which leads to better quality &
consistent packages for users.

> And yes, there is one new entry in the changelog of the F19 branch, is
> it a big deal to merge this change into others? I don't think so. In
> theory I agree with you, if we really wanted that the changelog reflect
> the evolution of the spec per branch, but that does mean that I have 5
> potentially different spec files to maintain instead of one and then
> merge the changes back to the other branch.

Since the changelog is the last thing in the spec, it is trivial to
keep per-branch changelogs while using common data for the rest of
the spec.

In any case I consider rpm changelogs to be mostly useless. They are
not useful for end users, which is why we provide formal user facing
descriptions when submitting updates. They are not useful to packagers
since they are just a poor duplicate of GIT history, or the upstream
ChangeLog with inaccurate/incomplete info. I rather wish they RPM
changelog would just go away, or be auto-filled with GIT history or
something else which is more useful

Daniel.
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|