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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 14:40 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 10:31 -0700, Adam Williamson 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?
> > 
> 
> When this was discussed for the example of GConf schemas in the
> packaging committee a few weeks ago, there was quite a bit of pushback
> about 'obscure macros' hiding whats really going on...

Honestly, that just sounds silly. It's not obscuring things, it's a
sensible level of abstraction and reuse.

I suspect you'd have trouble selling that position to developers -
"instead of calling functions from obscure external libraries, just copy
and paste the code from them into every single app you build!" I don't
think that'd go down a storm. ;)

As long as there's a clear and sensible policy for how macros should be
implemented (what the files should be called and what packages they
should go in), they wouldn't be 'obscure' at all. All you'd need to do
to check what a given macro did would be 'grep
(macroname) /etc/rpm/macros.*' or something similar.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net