spec.in

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 11:15 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> frederic heem wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Would it be possible to check-in dbus.spec.in and add the command in 
> > configure.in to fill to version ? 
> > Having dbus.spec included in the source package will avoid distributions to 
> > write their own incompatible and buggy spec.
> >
> 
> spec files aren't portable across distributions in any meaningful sense, 
> so if we checked it in it'd be specific to some distribution. But nobody 
> from a distribution wants to maintain their spec file upstream, they all 
> have a standard repo for their own spec files. So if we had one in dbus 
> cvs it would just be unmaintained, even if we could figure out what 
> distribution it was for.
> 
> Havoc

I still don't understand what the differences between distros is right
now.  I haven't looked at anyone's spec files besides my own but from
evidence across upstream projects which don't particularly care about
distros and will happily run on any one, it all just works.  The biggest
problem has been changing API's from version to version which was
unavoidable due to distro and D-Bus release cycles. Another problem I
have seen is some distros just not starting the session bus correctly or
just leaving it up to their users to decide how to deal with it.  

In any case the way to fix it is not to have a universal spec file which
will just go unmaintained (I have seen this happen in a lot of
projects).  The fix is to identify what in particular is causing real
differences in the distros and resolve this by coming to a consensus and
setting agreeable standards.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>