Hello all, I was wondering if there were any guidelines about the use of %bcond_* macros in Fedora spec files? I checked the wiki, and there are three pages that contain the string bcond in their text, but those are only in passing. Of course, the %bcond_* macros can give people flexibility in the features of the package should they need to use the src.rpm. (For example, needing to back-port a package to FC-4, say.) However, fwiw, my general observation of Fedora has been a tendency to include as many features as possible in packages. (Some people will probably think that this is a bad thing. Personally, I like this trend in general. But that's a discussion for an entirely different thread...) The main reason that I could see these macros being used in Fedora would be to allow people to exclude a feature that they weren't able to build with. For example, in some distant future, a package gets released for FC-8, and someone wants to backport that package to their FC-4 machine. However, the FC-8 package requires some devel packages that aren't available for FC-4. A %bcond_* macro would let that person just drop that feature from that package that they built using --without flags instead of going in, editing the spec file, and re-creating a new package. In this sense, %bcond_* macros could be a type of courtesy for legacy systems. On the other hand, however, the %bcond_* macros do lead to a certain lack of reproduceability in RPM builds. Of course, the exact command "rpmbuild --rebuild blah.src.rpm" will always produce the same package, even with %bcond_* macros. However, the general set of rebuild commands for blah.src.rpm would now include "rpmbuild --rebuild blah.src.rpm" and "rpmbuild --rebuild --with foo blah.src.rpm" which would probably *not* be the same package. So that we could conceivably end up having to ask people who have problems with such a package, "Did you build with the flag '--with foo'?" So is there some kind of policy (or more appropriately a guideline) regarding this kind of macro in spec files? Should even be there be such a guideline or not? (That is, do we even care?) -- John Guthrie guthrie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Fedora-maintainers mailing list Fedora-maintainers@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers -- Fedora-maintainers-readonly mailing list Fedora-maintainers-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers-readonly
