[oops, meant to cc this to the sig]
Hi Harry --
[and any other distutils-siggies who know more about RPM than me]
I'm beating the hell out of the bdist_rpm command to make it use config
files rather than the "package_data" file, and naturally a few questions
about RPM arise. Thought I'd ask you and the SIG instead of RTFM'ing.
(Hey, I don't have a copy of the RPM book at home... and I have to mooch
off someone else's at work.)
* are the {pre,post}_{install,uninstall} scripts specified as
raw shell code or filenames?
* if raw code, d'you think it would be acceptable to specify them as
filenames for the Distutils instead of trying to deal with shell (or
Python!) code in a config file?
* I'm punting on preserving the 'summaries' and 'descriptions'
dictionaries: either we craft a mapping syntax in config files, or
we expand 'description' and 'long_description' in the setup script
so they can be either a string (English description) or a dictionary
mapping 2-letter language codes to description in that language.
Opinions?
* what is "prep" for? is that a pre-build script? is it basically
the same as {pre,post}_{install,uninstall}?
* what should the default for "packager" be? I initially made it
default to "vendor" (which in turn defaults to the "contact" from
the setup script, ie. maintainer if present, author otherwise), but
then I had a dim recollection that packagers can set their
name/address in an RPM config file. True? Should "packager"
default to nothing, so RPM fills it in?
* should "release" be a string or a number? I've never seen a Red Hat
RPM with a non-integer "release", but what're the rules?
* what is "serial"?
* do you have an example Python module distribution that actually uses
most of the RPM options? The Distutils distribution is pretty
simple, so I can't fully test "bdist_rpm" with it.
* is it really necessary to pass the "--define _topdir ..." to RPM?
Recall that this breaks under RPM 2.x, and since I *still* haven't
gotten around to upgrading my Red Hat 5.2 system, this bites
me. (Who? me? procrastinating?)
OK! Enough of that; the good news is, I've rebuild enough of
"bdist_rpm" that we're back where we started, ie. it fails-to-work for me
just as it failed-to-work before I started ripping it apart. IOW, it
creates a reasonable-looking spec file, but dies because of the "rpm
--define" option. Well, guess what's next on my agenda.
Anyways, using the same ol' Distutils setup script that we're all
familiar with, and this setup.cfg:
"""
[bdist_rpm]
release = 3
packager = Harry Henry Gebel
participants (2)
-
Greg Ward
-
Harry Henry Gebel