[PATCH 0 of 2] Minor fixes to contrib/buildrpm

Mads Kiilerich mads at kiilerich.com
Tue Jun 23 20:05:42 CDT 2009


Stefano Tortarolo wrote, On 06/23/2009 07:05 PM:
> Side note: buildrpm uses a custom .spec file, maybe we could use the one used to build mercurial's official rpms in Fedora?
>    

Are you sure it isn't Fedora who uses a custom .spec file? ;-)

One reason they are different is the different goals. A distribution 
like Fedora wants to integrate the software as well as possible with the 
rest of distribution, make it adhere to packaging guidelines, split it 
up in minor peaces to avoid too big dependency chains, and often apply 
various fixes and backports. An "upstream" like Mercurial typically 
wants to provide an installer which installs the software as unmodified 
as possible and will often pay less attention to packaging guidelines as 
long as it works.

The biggest difference between Fedora and Mercurial specs is that Fedora 
splits Mercurial up in 4-5 different packages.

Another important difference is that Fedora packages are built from a 
released tar-ball and thus contains generated man pages etc. Mercurials 
spec builds from the repo and thus has to generate documentation with 
asciidoc and xmlto.

Finally: The Mercurial spec could and might work on other RPM-based 
distributions like Mandriva or Suse. Has anybody tested that?

/Mads


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