Hi Danny! :-)
>You seem to have knowledge of the RPM SPEC-file format. Could you
>tell me where it is documented ? I've looked but found nothing,
>so i probably looked in all the wrong places.
The main documentation for RPM is "Maximum RPM", it is a bit dated,
or so i hear, but seems fine to me. (I THINK most of what is outdated
pertains to the internal library APIs, primarily of interest to people
writing RPM tools that link with the RPM libraries, for the most part the
external use of RPM to create and install packages is not that different.)
Maximum RPM is available from as an HTML file from:
http://www.rikers.org
The direct url for download is:
http://www.rikers.org/rpmbook.tar.bz2
The postscript and Latex (as well as an online HTML copy) versions of
"Maximum RPM" are available ati
http://www.rpm.org
in the homepage section entitled "Documentation". In addition there
are some other docs available from http://www.rpm.org. Of course you
can also learn quite a bit about RPM by looking at the spec files from
other packages. For example installing all of the source RPMS from
an RPM distribution and then viewing the resulting spec files can tell
you alot. (Installing a source rpm merely copies the source tarball and
the spec file to a predetermined location, usually /usr/RPM/SOURCES and
/usr/RPM/SPEC, respectively, so by installing all the SOURCE rpms you are
not affecting your system.)
If you are interested in learning what RPM macros are available, (for
example, so that you can use the RPM default doc directory, which may vary
from system to system, rather than installing all docs under /usr/doc),
you can look at the various macro files in /usr/lib/rpm. Additionally,
executing the command:
rpm --showrc
will display the RPM resource file currently in effect.
>Note also that we don't have a specfile in CVS, but a lesstif.spec.in,
>to allow configure to substitute version numbers and such trivia.
Oh, sorry, i should have thought of that, will do next time.
>-> i have also re-enable the build of the static package. [...]
>-> Again i apologise if this is problematic.
>Not problematic, but not something I'm inclined to do. Nobody
>in their right mind uses static libraries, and i don't want to
>encourage people to download a useless amount of junk.
>So i edited it out a while ago.
I understand, but just to check, you do realise that enabling the
build of static libs in the spec file has no effect on what end users
will download? IOW, you might want to consider allowing the source
RPM to build the static package, but not making that static package RPM
available for download. That way people who are building from source
(and presumably know what they are doing) have the option of installing
the static package, whereas the people who simply download and install
all of the binary lesstif RPMS will not download, or even be aware of
the existance of, the static package. Just a thought. Also you might
consider using a conditional switch to turn spec file building on and
off instead of simply commenting out the relevant portions of the code?
That way people who build from source will not even see the static
package, but someone who really wants a static package and digs around a
bit in the spec file will see that they can set an enviroment variable
before building to get a static package. (Hehe, if you haven't guess,
i DO have a legit need for static linking!) In anycase, i apologise for
dewlling on the matter and i will accept your decision without further
comment. :-)
Thanks again,
Crazy Pete
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