Packaging Committee Meeting Summary (2010-02-03)

[Till Maas]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 10:13:52AM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 08:59:52AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 02:29:18PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > > SRPM Buildtime macros  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SRPM_Buildtime_macros
> > 
> > Did we consider fixing the bug in RPM/the packaging system instead of
> > pushing more work on packagers?
> > 
> This is not a response to a bug in rpm.  This addresses people trying to put
> macros into %descriptions when those macros aren't defined at the time of
> build.

Imho this is only what the guidelines say and it sounds to apply to use
cases like:
%description
This is a PyYAML for Python: %{python_version}

So the macro is part of what is going into the package's description.
Especially the case that it does not only mention %desription, but also
Summary make this very likely to be understood like this. E.g. why would
someone put a macro into the Summary tag, if not to make it appear in
the Summary tag?

> Nicolas's argument is that rpm does not automatically detect when he wants
> to end his %description and therefore he should be excluded from the
> requirement.

The argument is, that the macro is not used to create the %description
afaics. Imho this is a valid way, because using his macros before
%description seems not to work (I believe I tried). So for this case,
there is really a bug or annoyance in rpm: It's not possible to use
external macros at a good visible place within the SPEC that does not
end up in the %description if it is not expanded.
I also agree that fixing rpm should be at least the long goal and
that the issue should also be tracked, before there is an official
Guideline to work around this deficiency.

Regards
Till
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