OpenSuSE Buildsystem

[Andreas Thienemann]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:

> I've been talking with some of the SuSE guys and we agree there's some
> overlap or at least coordination between their buildsystem and ours.  The
> first obvious low hanging fruit is common macros.  For those who wonder
> "why would we help OpenSuSE?"  the answer is common goals, and better user
> experiences.

You sure about there being much overlap and thus a certain incentive to 
develop common macros?

The last time I was paid to look at SuSE was around 2003 or so and back 
then there was not much common except the .spec suffix.
BuildRequires weren't used at all (admittedly, Red Hat was rather frugal 
wrt BRs) and I haven't seen much use of %macros at all.

AFAICS BuildRequirements were implemented by parsing #-commented lines and
adding the named packages to the dependency list.

Has this behaviour changed?

On the other hand: Is the buildsystem the right place to work on common 
goals? I'd assume that specifically for macros, rpm.org is a better place.

regards,
  andreas