Proposal (and yes, I'm willing to do stuff!): Must Use More Macros

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Fri Jun 5 18:05:20 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 13:50 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:

> > It seems to me it'd make sense to convert all these kinds of snippets
> > into macros. Am I right, or is there a reason against doing this?
> It would be awesome to get rid of the boilerplate.  Honestly though,
> I'd rather the solution was "just works" than "replace giant glob of
> muck with %{glob_of_muck}"

Yes indeed, this would be best in many cases. Some can't really be done
like that, though - like the snippets for Tcl and Python to define the
version, directories for certain types of file and so on. They're
just...informational. Defining them as macros seems the optimal
solution.

> For instance, if a file gets dropped under /usr/share/icons/something
> rpm should run gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/something
> automatically.
> 
> the gtk2 package should be able to drop a file in /usr/lib/rpm/redhat
> that makes that happen.  likewise, desktop-file-utils should be able
> to drop a file there to make update-desktop-database get run and so
> on.
> 
> I don't know how hard it would be to fix rpm to allow for that though.

This is definitely possible; Mandriva (I know I talk about MDV a lot,
I'm sorry, it's what I know! :>) does this, via an implementation called
'file triggers'. This is not yet upstream, though. 

The MDV patch that implements this is:

http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/rpm/current/SOURCES/rpm-4.6.0-rc1-filetriggers.patch?view=markup

MDV's wiki discussion of it is here:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Rpm_filetriggers

It appears to be something upstream has thought about several times.
Here's an RPM 5 community discussion of it, with Jeff Johnson's
thoughts:

http://rpm5.org/community/rpm-devel/2959.html

Here's a discussion from the rpm.org Wiki:

http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Problems/Scriptlets

I'm not sure what the current status is for rpm.org - whether they're
actively working on a solution for this side of things or what.

Oh, and please try to consider the original proposal in replies to this
thread, as I sense a derail coming :). file triggers is certainly an
interesting topic, but there are some snippets which just don't fit the
case, see above.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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