On Apr 10, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Per Øyvind Karlsen wrote:

> 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 can show you dozens of bug reports that demonstrate the "problem". You
are not the first, just the most recent, to attempt to solve the  
problem.

Note: I made several attempts to solve the "problem", both publically
and privately, within rpm. The problem is insoluble imho. But I  
understand
the attempt, and the need for configuration quite well.

My issue is solely with what goes into rpm5.org default macros.in,  
not otherwise.

rpm5.org needs to avoid dictating anything to anybody.

> 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..

rpm singular? noone is stopping you or anyone else from doing  
whatever you wish.

That somehow is still not gud enuf. which means that rpm features,  
not documentation
or configuration or attempting to change existing world orders is  
what is needed ...

73 de Jeff