Re: Do we care about spec files?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:10:27PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> tis 2003-03-11 klockan 20.40 skrev Neil Weisenfeld:
> > Where's the proper place to ask about fixing the spec files distributed
> > w/ GNOME packages?  With the releases of nautilus, eel, gnome-desktop,
> > gnome-panel, and gnome-session, only one of these (eel) had a working
> > .spec file.  
> 
> Probably the best ways are 1) to submit bugs against the different
> packages in bugzilla with patches for the spec files and the PATCH
> keyword set, or 2) mail the package maintainers and offer to maintain
> the spec file for their package.
> 
> I guess most package maintainers with broken spec files are perfectly
> aware that there are problems with those files, it's just that noone has
> offered to update/maintain them or submitted patches for them
> recently.

2) is the only option for many packages, such as all of mine. I'm not
maintaining these spec files; if people start to complain/file bugs
I'm going to delete the files. ;-) 

> There used to be some spec file fixing activity in the GNOME Packaging
> Project (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gpp/). Perhaps you can also
> join (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gpp/join.html) there if you
> are interested in improving the situation.

This is the only right approach. If we want to have working spec
files, then someone has to own them and keep them up-to-date in CVS.

It's no small job, though. (I know, since I maintain many Red Hat
ones.)

Havoc