[Mageia-dev] Compatibility: %mdkversion macro?

Mon Jan 17 09:38:08 CET 2011

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 01:19:29AM +0100, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
+> Le dimanche 16 janvier 2011 00:07:56, Anssi Hannula a écrit :
+> > Hi all!
+> > 
+> > Should we have a %mdkversion (and %mdkver/%mdvver) that is hardcoded to
+> > 201100 for the time being, or should we not have one at all?
+> > 
+> > Not having it will cause any src.rpms that have any
+> > "%if %mdkversion < x" to fail to build.
+> > 
+> > I'm strongly in favor of having it for compatibility reasons, so that
+> > most MDV src.rpms keep building on Mageia for the time being, including
+> > those provided by any 3rd party packagers.
+> > 
+> > Not having the macro will cause us to lose that compatibility for very
+> > little benefit, IMO. It could maybe be removed after several releases,
+> > but not before.
+> > 
+> > However, it seems blino disagreed with this, and he thinks we should not
+> > have these macros at all.
+> > 
+> > What do other people think?
+> 
+> If not having those macros means we can't compile mdv SRPMS on mageia, then 
+> I'd prefer we keep it.
+
+then keep them forever ?
+
+Because for one, mdkversion should have disappeared when the suffix was changed,
+something like 5 years ago. And the fact we still rely on it is not a good sign.
+
+More ever, even on Mandriva, most of them do not make much sense. Most of the software
+are not backported ( as the usage of the macros is mainly for stuff replaced 
+by filetrigger ), and they are never cleaned.
+
+On the file trigger side, we have most of the macros going back to 2009.0, where we
+can't backport anything on the BS. And 2010.0 for the trigger for web application, and 
+I do not think we backport them usually ( as people barely see the value of packaging 
+them... ).
+
+So I think we will not have much problem, except this force us to do more cleaning.
+Cleaning that obviously didn't happened before, as we are needing to do it now.
+
+So drop it, have more generic macros, and smarter policy.
+
+For example, we do use it to wrap %_webapp_postun. We can simply undefine the macro
+when we want to have it removed, and define to nothing when is it not used,
+rather than using %if / %macro / %endif ( ie, 3 lignes instead of 1 ), and 2 edition of specs
+instead of 1, when the macro will do a error.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+