[CentOS] spec file frustration (rant)

Tue Dec 13 23:39:42 UTC 2016
Alice Wonder <alice at domblogger.net>

On 12/13/2016 03:34 PM, Phil Wyett wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-12-13 at 14:16 -0800, Alice Wonder wrote:
>> I'm getting spec files from centos git which is really convenient when
>> the related source is easy to find. But some things - e.g. from a spec file
>>
>> # How to create the source tarball:
>> #
>> # git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/python-rhsm.git/
>> # cd client/python-rhsm
>> # tito build --tag python-rhsm-$VERSION-$RELEASE --tgz
>>
>> Never used tito before, so I install it and try, and rather than giving
>> me the source package I need - it gives me a python traceback
>> complaining that I haven't configured some things properly.
>>
>> Seems a lot of the software distribution world is getting overly complex
>> with an expectation that the end user who needs to exercise his FLOSS
>> rights has to use git or nodejs or for php composer or whatever just to
>> get what use to be available with no more complexity than choosing
>> tar.gz or tar.bz2 or .zip if the dev was Windows.
>>
>> Whatever happened to KISS and why can't source tarballs be distributed
>> as source tarballs?
>>
>> Back when I was a Fedora packager - the packaging guidelines would
>> reject a package of the Source tarball wasn't a URL and if the timestamp
>> on the tarball in the src.rpm didn't match upstream even if the checksum
>> was identical.
>>
>> Guess those days are gone.
>>
>> /rant
>
> Hi,
>
> Not seen this one before, but don't play with much python. The SPEC
> really should just refer too a URL too a compressed archive as the
> packages home site supplies them.
>
> https://github.com/candlepin/python-rhsm/releases
>
> Regards
>
> Phil

I went to the github and it doesn't have a packaged release that matches 
the version. I managed to find it in the build system logs, but its just 
weird.

If I recall, formerly for a tarball to be different than what was on 
upstream, it had to have a legal reason (e.g. patents) and a script in 
the sources that could turn upstream tarball into the version used.