On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:16 AM, Alice Wonder <alicewonder@shastaherps.org> wrote:

On Tue, 2013-08-06 at 07:57 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> I was trying to decide if I would bother trying make the official
> packages conflict with theirs, I think it may be more of a case of
> caveat emptor. In the case of the libraries though, he appends a 0 to
> the package name. I'm not sure what problems that would create.
>

I have no idea how their build system works but one thing that may help
is to provide a patch that makes package.spec.in and a makefile rule.

That way they won't have to do much maintenance on the spec file and you
can write it so that it at least conforms with fedora package naming /
splitting guidelines if not fully fedora compliant.

They are nice to haves to generate them the first time, but upstream spec files are rarely compliant with the guidelines and it would be impractical to keep the changelog intact. It was nice already having a starting place though so I didn't have to create a spec from scratch.

They generally don't change drastically but incrementally so the only time I would likely reference an upstream spec file (after the initial packaging) is if they made some major changes.

Richard