Re: git 0.99.9: Subversion importer breaks RPM generation (rpmbuild bug)

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

[...]

I do not know much about how things are done in the RPM world,
but is there a concept of "the upstream" vs "packaging
maintainer" there?  IOW, are the majority of RPM binary packages
done by the upstream maintainer?

No, they aren't. RPM is set up so you can take the vanilla upstream package
and add local patches, special configuration, ... at will downstream.

I am currently generating i386 RPMs and i386 debs myself but I
am not particularly proud of the current setup.  I do not have
an RPM based machine that I can install the result myself to
test (which is what started this thread).  Since I am not a
Debian developer (and I do not particularly wish to become one
myself), the debs I generate will not be official anyway.
Personally I'd be happier if I can just lose rpm and deb targets
from the "upstream" Makefile (git-core.spec file and debian/
subdirectory as well while we are at it), ask "packaging
maintainers" to pull from kernel.org/ tree and do RPMs and Debs
outside.

Please keep the git-core.spec file, it is useful to be able to build RPMs
directly from the tarball.

[...]

One thing we could do without breaking much of the current
arrangement is to have a team of people to help porting for
major packaging formats (RPMs and Debs mostly but I know we have
OpenBSD and Darwin people here too), and ask them to feed me the
updates to rpm/deb/whatever target in the Makefile as needed.
Especially before a major release I could ask them to test
things out and generate binary packages, perhaps taken out of
the tip of the master branch, or even another "for-porters"
branch for this purpose.

Good idea. Will build RPMs regularly then.
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