[Rpm-ecosystem] Wish: Modular RPM recipe capability

[Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)]

Hello,

As a packager of software for an RPM distro, I tend to enjoy a lot of the
benefits of the RPM style of packaging (such as flexibility on how patches
and sources are arranged, how sources are extracted and arranged, macros
for easily building packages of modules like gems, java classes, etc.), but
there's one thing that I would like to be able to do: separate sections out
into their own files and declare something along the lines of an include
statement to import the actions specified there into the spec.

I've seen some really long and hairy spec files, and it can get hard to
manually parse through sometimes. I know that the Debian world does this by
default (and doesn't allow monolithic scripts, period), but the approach
they follow makes things confusing, because there's no "master recipe" that
actually shows the structure of the package scripts. Not only that, the
minimum amount of effort required for very simple packages is somewhat
higher with Debian packages because there's more to juggle around.

I love being able to have the whole recipe for building a package in one
file, but sometimes I wish it were possible to break out some parts when it
gets complicated. I've looked around on the Internet, and I've not seen any
reference to RPM having the equivalent of a C-style include statement that
would allow something like that relatively easily.

Is it possible to do this? If not, could this be something that could be
added in a manner that wouldn't break the way current specs are made? I
think there are plenty of folks that would appreciate the flexibility that
this would provide.

Perhaps it's just wishful thinking, but I love using RPM and I want it to
be unequivocally the best packaging system out there! In my view, this is
the only real weakness I've perceived.

Any thoughts?

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