Looking for testers: RPM 4.9 alpha

[Simo Sorce]

On Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:15:52 +0200 (EET)
Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 
> > Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >> The draft release notes are at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0
> >
> > 1. This change:
> > | Packages with no files can now omit the %files section and still
> > have | packages generated.
> > is going to make it a PITA to conditionalize the building of
> > subpackages, and it's going to break several existing KDE specfiles
> > very badly (and with no warning!): RPM will silently generate empty
> > subpackages where none is wanted.
> >
> > More precisely, when we wanted to conditionalize or comment out the
> > creation of a subpackage (e.g. in kde-l10n for languages which are
> > currently not available), what we did so far was to %if out only
> > the %files section for the subpackage, not %package or things like
> > %post, and this would reliably omit the subpackage. Now we'll have
> > to %if out ALL sections referring to the subpackage: %package to
> > prevent the subpackage from being built, and all other sections
> > referring to it because they'll error out if the %package is not
> > there.
> 
> This change can be reconsidered.

Wouldn't it be better instead to create a specific directive to disable
unwanted subpackages ?

Something like:
%suppress <subpackagename>

This would make it clear what the author of the RPMs wants to do w/o
relying on hacks like suppressing the %files section.

Bonus if it checks the suppressed package %files for installed files
that need to be skipped even if "not packaged" so as to not error out.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York