[Distutils] Self Introduction and Getting Hands On

[Tarek Ziadé]

On 6/26/12 1:23 PM, Bohuslav Kabrda wrote:
> [...]
> Exactly, my project is aimed at creating just the specfiles. In Fedora (and other distros as well), there is a review process that each package must go through and having a specfile written according to the current guidelines is a necessary part of that. "pypi2rpm" solves a different use case than distro-packagers need.
>
> I have a pretty good idea about how distro-packagers would like things to work and combining it with the "pypi2rpm", I see it this way:
> 1) Starting point: we have a Python package.
> 2) We want to:
> 2a) directly convert it to binary RPM => we use "pypi2rpm" - good for Mozilla to deploy apps, not useful for distro-packagers
>   - Producing binary RPM probably could be left in distutils, but looking at the bigger picture, RPM has different lifecycle than python standard library, so it might be good to pull this functionality out.
Yeah -- I had no intent to keep bdist_rpm in the stdlib. We removed it 
from distiutils2

> 2b) produce a specfile/whatever that is called in other distributions => use Fedora's "pyp2rpm"/is there something similar for other distributions?
You mean for RPM that are not Fedora/RHEL ?  I have no idea.
>   - This should definitely be present in a library outside of Python - we may want to provide templates/distro-specific stuff here and be able to react to new releases of different distros (when they change their way of packaging).
>
> So the best approach that currently comes to my mind is having a functionality in distutils, that can provide the package metadata (license, runtime/build requirements)
you can already have this, with the current Distutils code.

> and separate tool(s) that would be able to use these metadata to
> a) convert directly to binary packages (rpm, deb, etc.)
> or
> b) produce specfiles/whatever for the packagers' reviews
>
> Some questions that pop immediately are
> - Should a) and b) be one library or two? They handle packages in completely different way.]
In a different project I think. For debian there's 'stdeb'  - 
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/stdeb


> - Should every distribution provide its very own library to handle a) and b) stuff or should these be a general libraries with distro-specific modules+templates?
> ...

As a user I want to pick up *any* project, and build a deb or a rpm, 
even it the author did not provide the deb/rpm integration, even if I 
eventually need to tweak the process.

>
> How does this sound? This is just a general idea that came to my mind some time ago - feel free to dump it, if you don't like it :)
So what are your plans ?

> Have a nice day,
> Slavek.
>
>> Cheers
>> Tarek
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