Fedora Extras, Fedora Core CVS Open!

[Warren Togami]

Dag Wieers wrote:
> I'm willing to commit a big chunk of my packages if SPEC files can be used 
> for multiple distributions/releases and there's infrastructure to avoid 
> having to fork SPEC files if unnecessary. (I don't care about a specific 
> implementation and am open to discuss alternatives)
> 
> A big part of the packages don't require a mandatory fork or don't require 
> dist-specific macros. And an even bigger part only has a few macros.
> 
> Fedora Extras has to decide whether it will allow those extra macros to 
> make it easier to manage SPEC files or if they fork for each new Fedora 
> release. There are a few drawbacks, but imnsho there are more advantages.
> (less maintenance required, more communities/resources involved, RHEL 
> users don't have to fork Fedora stuff and vice versa, ...)

We can examine proposals for additional macros for technical merit after 
things settle down.  Right now I am skeptical, but willing to read and 
experiment later.  No promises though.

> 
> Only fork SPEC files when the complexity of maintaining them becomes 
> harder than the complexity of keeping things synchronised.

This is generally how the old fedora.us operated, but things are 
changing now.

With CVS I personally find it easy to maintain forks in a way similar to 
how I manage the gaim package in FC4/FC3/RHEL4/FC2/RHEL3.  Imposing hard 
coded distribution names and numbers in .spec makes things far more ugly 
IMHO.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com