[Mailman-Users] Red Hat FHS packaging

[John Dennis]

On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 08:05 +0100, Andy Heath wrote:
> A plea  to Redhat - if you are going to purloin
> mailman and do it with FHS then a file that
> accompanies the mailman distribution that explains
> how to do a manual build that conforms to the way
> RH does it would be very useful - a "how to manually
> build for FC£ (which ends up with files in the same
> places as FC has them).

There is indeed a file that recreates the build, it's the src rpm and
it's readily available. The src rpm contains the virgin tarball, all the
current patches, and the mailman.spec spec file that controls the build.

Users familiar with distributions utilizing rpm as the packaging tool
(of which Red Hat / Fedora is only just one example) routinely download
src rpms, tweak them for their own use and rebuild. This is standard
practice.

> Since you need to
> be following the development and dealing with
> that issue anyway I can't see that it is any
> extra work to write up the method and keep that
> up to date and contributed to the mm distribution.

It's not appropriate for the mailman project to maintain rpms, this is
the domain of distributions which repackage "upstream". This has been
the working model of open source development almost since its inception.

> As its not extra cost the only reason I can see
> that RH would NOT do that is to lock persons in
> to RH.

Everything you have asked for is available, free, and transparent. I
suspect your conclusions are driven by a lack of familiarity with how to
find what you are looking for rather than anything devious. To suggest
disingenuous lock in by Red Hat is utter nonsense.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>