[Mageia-dev] Compatibility: %mdkversion macro?

Fri Jan 21 14:45:37 CET 2011

On 17.01.2011 10:38, Michael scherer wrote:
+> 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.
+
+The problem is not backports IMO, it is building 3rdparty src.rpm or old
+src.rpm on Mageia (i.e. forward-porting), which won't work if we do not
+have %mdkversion.
+
+-- 
+Anssi Hannula
+