[Mageia-dev] [134638] - clean spec

[Michael Scherer]

Le mardi 23 août 2011 à 16:23 +0200, grenoya a écrit :
> Le 23/08/11 15:44, Thierry Vignaud a écrit :
> > On 21 August 2011 15:44, Colin Guthrie<mageia at colin.guthr.ie>  wrote:
> >> I do have to wonder why those macros are used... it seems quite trivial
> >> to use the actual commands directly and that ultimately increases
> >> portability (which maybe isn't a major concern, but all the same)
> >>
> >> What are the general thoughts on this?
> >
> > As a 12+ years maintainer of mdv/mdv/mga, I think most spec don't use those.
> > They don't bring anything anyway.
> > If only, we could standardize on the most usefull macros between distro at first
> > (eg %make vs make %{?_smp_mflags})
> 
> '%foo' commands are wrappers.
> Like '%make' is a wrapper for "make -j4" (parralel compilation on 4 nodes)
> It can be quicker to build with the command, but in some cases (I met 
> some) it brakes the build.
> 
>  From my point of view (I am not packager since long) commands are great 
> tools, it eases our work a lot :)
> So I agree with Tv: we should use them every time it is possible. At 
> least the most commons.

the problem is that we are not sure when there is a wrapper, and when
there is one and it doesn't nothing more, they obscure the fact that rpm
is just a shell script + metadata.  I think for some people, this look
like magic :)

So when the macro do something more, yes we need to use it.
If not, and if we want to follow others distribution, we should take a
look at their policy 

I found the one of Fedora on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Macros , and
basically, they say "use rm rather than %{_rm}". 

If someone can find the one of Suse or others, that would help use to
see if a consensus emerge

-- 
Michael Scherer