[Mageia-dev] Compatibility: %mdkversion macro?

[Michael scherer]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 01:19:29AM +0100, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
> Le dimanche 16 janvier 2011 00:07:56, Anssi Hannula a écrit :
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > Should we have a %mdkversion (and %mdkver/%mdvver) that is hardcoded to
> > 201100 for the time being, or should we not have one at all?
> > 
> > Not having it will cause any src.rpms that have any
> > "%if %mdkversion < x" to fail to build.
> > 
> > I'm strongly in favor of having it for compatibility reasons, so that
> > most MDV src.rpms keep building on Mageia for the time being, including
> > those provided by any 3rd party packagers.
> > 
> > Not having the macro will cause us to lose that compatibility for very
> > little benefit, IMO. It could maybe be removed after several releases,
> > but not before.
> > 
> > However, it seems blino disagreed with this, and he thinks we should not
> > have these macros at all.
> > 
> > What do other people think?
> 
> If not having those macros means we can't compile mdv SRPMS on mageia, then 
> I'd prefer we keep it.

then keep them forever ?

Because for one, mdkversion should have disappeared when the suffix was changed,
something like 5 years ago. And the fact we still rely on it is not a good sign.

More ever, even on Mandriva, most of them do not make much sense. Most of the software
are not backported ( as the usage of the macros is mainly for stuff replaced 
by filetrigger ), and they are never cleaned.

On the file trigger side, we have most of the macros going back to 2009.0, where we
can't backport anything on the BS. And 2010.0 for the trigger for web application, and 
I do not think we backport them usually ( as people barely see the value of packaging 
them... ).

So I think we will not have much problem, except this force us to do more cleaning.
Cleaning that obviously didn't happened before, as we are needing to do it now.

So drop it, have more generic macros, and smarter policy.

For example, we do use it to wrap %_webapp_postun. We can simply undefine the macro
when we want to have it removed, and define to nothing when is it not used,
rather than using %if / %macro / %endif ( ie, 3 lignes instead of 1 ), and 2 edition of specs
instead of 1, when the macro will do a error.

-- 
Michael Scherer