On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 21:26 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote: > --On Friday, October 21, 2005 3:31 PM -0700 "Michael A. Peters" > <mpeters@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > However, some software is not available as rpm - and I don't believe > > that the end user should be responsible for creating an rpm themselves. > > It's relatively straightforward to create a spec file for simple > applications that packages a source tarball. Yes it is. If you know how to do it. I only install software on my system through rpm. But being relatively simple for someone like me does not mean it is relatively simple for other people, and it does require a learning process. Some upstream tarballs contain a generic spec file that works on most systems - then you can just do rpmbuild -ta foo.tar.gz but I've actually found quite a few that have packaging errors themselves. Then there's issue where DESTDIR support is not always proper and some patches to the Makefile need to be added, gnome applications will require you to disable gconf updating during the install and do it in the post script, etc. Users should not be expected to learn how to package rpm's unless they need to learn it for another reason. I do think that developers should learn rpm so they can provide a *quality* generic spec file, some spec files I've seen are just scary (and often not generated by autoconf so the version ends up being wrong if they don't remember to manually update it for a new release) -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
