[Rpm-ecosystem] Sync of rpm macros between Fedora/openSUSE

[Neal Gompa]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 7:45 AM, Tomas Chvatal <tchvatal at suse.cz> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I would like to ask about possibility to spent some time to sync macros
> between our nice distributions.
>
> I've seen email from Florian asking about the similar thing in the
> archives, so to bit expand on what I have on my mind.
>
> As in past i would like to first review the macros we have in both and
> try to sync them to some common degree.
> There are areas that are quite fine, like python, but also areas
> diverging horribly, like systemd macros.
>
> Atm most of the macros are stored together with the packages they are
> used for (kde macros in kde, systemd in systemd, python in python, etc
> etc). I would suggest we create some common repository to contain these
> and slowly merge them in. After all the packages can then download
> files from this repository quite fine and we can still keep the
> modularity of not having to put all the macros to rpm or to have some
> package like rpm-macros-blob containing everything.
>
> Because as we did this already once in past it worked for a bit but
> then we started to diverge a lot again. With common repository we could
> accomodate for most needs and actually make it work.
>
> Ie. we at SUSE have multiple ruby implementations so we have overbroad
> macros for that, but there is no reason why those macros could not
> understand RH system and use simplified values for that and vice-versa
> in other scenarios.
>
> What would you think about this?
>
> Cheers
>
> Tom

This would be fantastic, actually. It would also make it easier to
identify "authoritative" macros to use when building packages and
gradually work towards having functionally identical mechanisms for
being able to package software, reducing the burden for someone like a
Fedora packager, a Mageia packager, openSUSE packager, etc. to be able
to have the same software.

After all, if we can reduce the overall effort it takes to produce
packages by being able to reuse each other's work, we can better focus
on adding new and awesome stuff to our respective distributions.



-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!