Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:
El Miércoles 11 Marzo 2009, Gerry Reno escribió:
> Manuel,
> Additionally, from a Python Distutils perspective, Distutils should
> not be enforcing one distro's policy. There are RPM-based distro's that
> DO NOT follow fedora's packaging policy.


Well then, give me one packaging policy that is discordant or incompatible with Fedora's packaging policy. I'm sure you can show us that.
Ok, Mandriva comes to mind.  It's policy is different and allows more flexibility than Fedora's.

Besides, policies are meant for humans.  And policies change.  We don't need distro policies hard-coded into Distutils.  That makes for brittle code.



Besides, we're not enforcing a distro policy here over all platforms. My patches merely reformat the existing information to make it lexicographically compatible with RPM package managers (which are the SAME across all bdist_rpm distro targets), and that's it. You still get to specify your release numbers if you want to, and the version numbers are intelligently determined based on heuristics but in the case of stable releases, they are just as they used to be before.


> The software should only be
> concerned with providing for the use of both the 'version' and 'release'
> strings in all distribution targets. It should not concern itself with
> HOW those fields are formatted.


If distutils did only that and we were to reject the distutils patches I wrote, then I would simply be technically unable to build Plone for Fedora or RHEL.
Why?  A distro's policy is defined for 'human' behavior for users of that distro.  Users of distro X should not be hostage to policies of distro Y.   'version' and 'release' should be formatted by humans for whatever distro is the target.  There should be no enforcement of any distro's  'packaging policy' over the fields.


Regards,
Gerry