On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 22:26 +0200, Till Maas wrote:
On Thu October 9 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 18:16 +0200, Till Maas wrote:
> > On Thu October 9 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > Only if we allow source repo tags to be a suitable source distribution
> > > method. Since fedorahosted still doesn't have an easy to use way of
> > > distributing tarballs, and getting the code via a scm checkout is quite
> > > easy, it should suffice.
> >
> > If this is the only obstacle to get this done, I will write a patch for
> > Makefile.common that displays the URL for every file in sources to fetch
> > it from the lookaside cache. Then this URL can be provided as source
> > tarball on a fedorahosted wiki page.
>
> Why must we insist on tarballs? Unless the tarball includes scm
> metadata in it, it's practically useless for upstream patch development.
Tarballs allow to easily build the desired software via rpm and test it. With
make patch and make rediff and make prep from Makefile.common it is also
pretty easy to create and update patches. I have sucessfully created patches
for upstream using this. Using directly an upstream scm, it is always a PITA
to make the spec build from there, because the spec needs to be heavily
modificated or I have to remember to recreate the tarball everytime. It would
like it very much, if this would be a lot easier, e.g. some intelligent
macros in spec files that allow to use a scm instead of a tarball to be used
as Source0 and some magic that allows to define what from the scm should be
used, e.g. should uncommited changes be used?
Nevertheless, there have to be tarballs in the cvs lookaside cache, therefore
it is not much work to link to them. Therefore I do not really see what needs
to be discussed here. ;-)
I'm trying to see things from somebody else's point of view. Recently,
on this list, somebody else was arguing that we in Fedora land should be
doing away with tarball distribution, and srpm distribution, and instead
direct everything back to SCM, and to work on RPM so that it just
understood SCM and left tarballs in the past. Thank you for providing
some argument against that (:
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating