[Python-Dev] Proposal -- makefile patches and scripts to generate python RPMs

[Jeremy Hylton]

>>>>> "ESR" == Eric S Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> writes:

  ESR> In the course of maintaining fetchmail, I've developed
  ESR> effective techniques for integrating RPM and lsm generation
  ESR> into the release machinery of a package.  I'm willing to do
  ESR> this for Python; it will involve adding a makefile production
  ESR> and a couple of scripts to the distribution.

  ESR> The benefit would be that we could generate correct RPMs
  ESR> automatically and ship them with each release.  I think RPM is
  ESR> a sufficiently important distribution format to justify this
  ESR> effort.  Comments?

We are now distributing RPMs for RH 6 with Python and have plans to
support other distributions we have access to, namely those available
on the SF compile farm.

This page has the RPMs:
http://www.pythonlabs.com/products/python2.0/download_python2.0b2.html

Can you compare this approach to using a hand-crafted .spec file for
the RPMs?  It took a little while to figure out how to generate the
.spec, but now that it has been created it does not seem hard to
maintain.

I imagine, without knowing any details of what you propose, that this
is primarily beneficial for people who do not know how to build RPMs.

Jeremy