[Fedora-packaging] Scripting language dependencies

[Tom Lane]

Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> writes:
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:43:19 -0800
> Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 10:10:48AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> [ whinging about python-psycopg2 ]

>> Without python3 installed, macros in the spec file can't be expanded
>> correctly (because their definitions depend on python3).  The spec
>> file is BuildRequireing python3 so it shouldn't be expected that you
>> can operate on the spec file without python3 installed.

> I'd prefer to see specs a bit more robust so that for instance you
> could run "spectool" on them to download upstream sources and then do a
> mockbuild, which wouldn't require python3 or whatever to be installed
> on the build host.

Precisely.  There are *lots* of situations where we expect to be able
to parse specfiles without necessarily having all their buildreqs
installed (for the most obvious case: to find out what BRs are needed).
I think one of the goals of this guideline should be to prevent creep
in the set of packages that have to be present before tools like fedpkg
will operate on a specfile without complaint.

			regards, tom lane