Brief (and early) ode to fedpkg

[Martin Langhoff]

I was a git hacker, so the noise around fedpkg drew my attention. Now
that I'm working on preparing some patched and custom RPMs for OLPC's
XS, I am starting to use it, and I have to say, it rocks.

Haven't heard other OLPC'ers talk about it... if you're not using it,
it's worth a good shot.

What's so good? With the old CVS, it was hard to prep a 'forked' spec,
say adding 2 patches to it, and track Fedora's CVS. And the Fedora
specs relied on a 'common' set of scripts that were pulled from CVS
too, so if you put the spec in git, it wouldn't build.

Many olpc packages ended up with odd and disparate makefiles to make
building them "easier". That's ended up being a drag, each package has
its own build infra, and they all differ from Fedora's.

Fedpkg has consolidated Fedora's common stuff into its code, so all
you need is a git checkout with a spec file and some patches right
there. And it'll build your stuff, locally, via koji, whatever.

Real Nice.

And it's a much smoother path to get the packaging itself into Fedora
(or EPEL, as it's more likely with my stuff).

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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