Re: [libvirt] RFC: spec file cleanup ideas

> On the other hand... Why do we ship the .spec file in the first > place? Is Fedora, or any other distribution for that matter, > using it as-is? Or is it meant to be just for developers' > convenience? > > Personally, I'd be happy having to maintain a single build > system and leaving downstream packaging to distributions. But > maybe that's just a consequence of my background in Debian > packaging :) We do actually share the spec file between RHEL and Fedora with local changes largely only for changelog and adding patches. I love the way it works for libvirt because it distributes the burden of maintaining packaging among the whole team (at least those employed by redhat). Especially when we needed to build for RHEL5 up to latest Fedora. It also allows for 'make rpm' which is handy for a whole bunch of reasons, especially for new contributors on fedora/rhel who want to test a bug fix without having to figure out the proper configure invocation to get a working setup.