package, package2, package3 naming-with-version exploit

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 02:09:20AM +0100, Michael Scherer wrote:
> If I am not wrong, on debian, you can have 1 single source package that
> by magic could generate multiple packages for multiple runtimes ( for
> example, for python ). The issue of having multiple stack remain ( ie, 2
> stack just mean twice the QA, twice more bugs for that packager ), but
> that greatly reduce the burden, that's right.

You could do this for RPMs too.  It's just a bit tedious because you
have to have a %build section that looks like:

  for python in python2.4 python2.5 python3.2; do
    %configure --with-python=$python
    make clean
    make
  done

The Debian tools hide this, a bit, at the cost of being very hard to
debug when things go wrong (IME).

Anyway, I've done lots of Debian packaging and there's nothing
significantly better about dpkg.  In fact in many ways it's a lot
worse than RPM.  Having a single controlling spec file and a single
system for packaging is a *far* better approach IMHO.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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