[Fedora-packaging] [Proposal] Packaging guidelines/spec per version

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Quoting Toshio Kuratomi (2013-03-13 16:18:15)
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 01:12:00PM +0100, V?t Ondruch wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Wouldn't it be possible to have packaging guidelines versioned by
> > Fedora version?
> 
> It is and we already do.  For instance, the java guidelines which have
> differences depending on how the tools in the relevant Fedora release are
> implemented/available.
> 

Well, you are both partially right I guess :-)

Current Maven guidelines[1] say:
 "For Fedora 19 and newer, packages SHOULD..."

And then we have section "Older packaging techniques" which says:
 "From Fedora 15 to Fedora 18, maven 3 is used and the package is called
 maven-local. Packages built using maven-local ship with pom.xml files. They
 SHOULD..."

I guess what Vit is asking for is to get some formal/unified way to express
these changes between releases. Currently they are expressed ad-hoc *somewhere*
in the guideline text. It can be really hard to track down unless:

 1) you wrote the guidelines
 2) you read whole guidelines
 3) both of the above in some cases, because people forget...

What I would propose to Vit: come up with a nice unified way to express these
guideline updates. A separate section, tagging, headers...something. I would
like to see something unified as well. It's extremely painful to update
guidelines in Java and keep same packaging style for all releases. It would be
nice if we could break that from time to time...

> > If this would be accompanied by the rule, that .spec
> > files can't be shared as well (using some conditions), this would
> > allow us to have much faster evolution of our packaging. I'll give
> > you a few examples.
> > 
> This is a non-starter, I'm afraid.

Well, current F19+ Maven specfiles won't build in F17 and F18. But it's not
immediately obvious. It's partially explained in guidelines, but not completely.
*If* someone merges spec from rawhide to F17/18 they will be in for weird
surprise...

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Java#Apache_Maven

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Developer Experience

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: signature
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/packaging/attachments/20130313/ebc83709/attachment.sig>