På Torsdag 10 april 2008 , 17:55:05 skrev Jeff Johnson:
> Not true. There are already Packaging Policy Police and you have  
> chosen a macro
> name that falls within their claimed territority, and are going to  
> attempt to populate
> that macro with values that are "generally" useful, rather than  
> leaving the value
> to whatever Packaging Police Authority to chose to do with as they wish.
The problem is that such Packaging Police Authority are quite fragmented and 
implementing the same thing in each their own way due to lack of existing 
macros upstream.
>
> You chose to conflict by refactoring a platform specific macro name  
> into default
> rpm configuration.
Considering that macros may be overriden, there's no conflict. Leaving a some 
what standard macro in place then for others to override it for their use is 
IMHO better since people will then at least use the same name for macro 
making spec files a hint more portable. I do recall someone criticizing 
creation of macros like %mkrel in Mandriva that were non-standard and making 
things less portable. ;p
>
> rpm5.org devel needs to be vendor neutral in order to focus on more  
> important
> issues than what value (and whether it is a symlink or a directory)  
> the AutoFu (and
> LSB and FHS and MacOSX and ...) chose to configure as default.
Unless the use of such macros are forced on anyone, there's no problem. 

I think one of the biggest problems with rpm these days is lack of 
standardization and everyone keeping reinvent the weel making it a lot harder 
to share efforts between distributions, which is in contrast to ie. the 
Debian world. Having macros in place upstream for common actions won't force 
anything upon anyone, but will make it more likely that distributions pick up 
on existing macros..
-- 
Regards,
Per Øyvind Karlsen