What about starting to use project-builder for native packages?

[Christoph Wickert]

On Thursday 15 April 2010 10:52:21 Richard Bos wrote:
> Op donderdag 15 april 2010 04:42:21 schreef Thomas Spuhler:
> > I agree with some of the concerns Gunnar has. The packages built on the
> > 
> >  OpenSuse BS will not work on other distros. But I think if they build
> >  and work on OpenbSuse or Debian or etc. they would build and work on
> >  other distros with much less work and effort to put in than the current
> >  openpkg versions. It would more encourge packagers of other distros to
> >  build and provide native version on their distros.
> 
> Short reply on Thomas' remark, I'll reply on Gunnar's email later:
> - the packages build on the openSUSE build server are, native Fedora,
> Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian packages!   They are -->not<-- openSUSE specific.

FWIW they are kind of specific. Please let me explain:
Each distribution has different packaging guidelines, different macros 
different package names and all that stuff. Developers usually focus on this 
or that distribution. I for example focus on Fedora/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu 
but hardly don't know anything about OpenSUSE or Mandriva and nearly nothing 
about Gentoo...

In general I think that packagers should only build packages for distros that 
they are familiar with.

> Takes this repository as an example:
> http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/rbos:/ib/

I looked at your packages and none of the specs for the Fedora 
packages would really be acceptable for inclusion in Fedora, even though the 
guidelines for Fedora and OpenSUSE are pretty similar (because OpenSUSE took 
over large parts of Fedora's guidelines, including the typos ;)).
Please don't take this as personal criticism, I'm just stating facts.

> One spec file (for rpm based distributions) results in packages for many
> different distributions and architectures.  This is done by loading an
> image with e.g. Mandriva and perform the build the build of the spec file
> in that image.  Really wonderful

If you try to honor all the differences between the distributions, you end up 
with a spec full of conditionals. So what happens is that the spec gets hard 
to maintain, but on the other hand the value it adds - one spec to rule them 
all - is pretty small.

For those who never looked at the OpenSUSE Build Service, please take a look 
at http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/cross_distribution_package_how_to 

Even worse than a cluttered spec: A lot of the macros are OSB specific, so the 
resulting SRPMs cannot be rebuild on the distributions they were built for - 
they can only be built inside the OSB.

I haven't looked at project-builder yet, but I think we should take it into 
account because for me OSB is not an option.

Regards,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Wickert
Senior Engineer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: wickert at kolabsys.com
t: +49 251 871 369 77
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 85DACC63 Christoph Wickert