hal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hal Wine) writes: > I haven't seen anything besides "don't do it" in my googling, but I > figure someone has done it. > > How do folks create spec files to support different distributions of > linux? (e.g. RH AS and SuSE). > > I'm hoping to find a list of tips, such as "require files, not > packages, to get around naming differences". Others have already given you some pointers. I've been building Postfix for RH versions from 5.x-EL 3.0 (Yellowdog, Mandrake) with various optional bits like MySQL, TLS, pcre, .... (http://postfix.WL0.org). This has been more of a hobby project than anything else especially since initially there was no Postfix RPM produced by anyone when I started this. Certainly the big problem in building a spec file which supports multiple distributions is that the dependencies change, the requires or buildrequires change, older versions of a distribution behave differently from newer versions and your spec file / scripts have to take these differences into account. If you are lucky a package built on RH7 should work on all RH7.x versions, and maybe later, but often the library changes from one distribution version to the next mean that you need to build new binary rpms because of this. I imagine that multi-distribution spec files get worse the more distributions you add. Of course you need to know the distributions quite well to ensure that everything works as expected and have test machines (or chroots) to do all the building. I finally use a postfix.spec.in file and a script which takes optional arguments building a spec file which can be used for the target distribution. The disadvantage of something like this is that you can't do a rpmbuild --rebuild. Including all the stuff in my "make specfile script" within the spec file is probably possible but the rpm macros required to do this make the package too ugly IMO. It would certainly be nice to have better packaging guidelines from the vendors so that at least at the packaging level the distribution differences (or different distribution versions) caused fewer headaches, but somehow I don't see that happening. Good luck, I hope you package is simple enough that you don't get caught out by some of the more irritating gotchas... Simon _______________________________________________ Rpm-list mailing list Rpm-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
