id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
76	spec: Pull sources directly from SVN/GIT	dmik		"Currently, for many packages the logic of obtaining the sources to build the package is like this:

 1. Take the original vendor source archive.
 2. Generate an OS/2 diff from SVN/GIT between the corresponding vendor branch and the corresponding revision of the trunk.
 3. Apply the diff to the source tree from 1.
 4. Pack the archive from 1. and the diff from 2. in the source RPM.

This approach has several problems:

 a. You need to find and download the right source archive and generate the right diff each time you want to make a new RPM package. This is kind of double work since both the source and the diff are already in the repo, matched and merged.
 b. The information about the exact SVN/GIT commit the sources are taken from is lost. This makes it hard to tell which state of the source tree the given RPM release represents. It's therefore easy to mess things up when there are too many packages to maintain.

I have a better solution which I already tested on a small `which` package. In short, the logic looks like this:

 1. Add two variables to .spec: `svn_url` and `svn_rev` which point to the correct SVN branch and revision of the source tree to build (including all necessary OS/2 patches etc).
 2. In the `%prep` section, check for the presence of the ZIP with the given revision in SRCS and if not there, check it out right from SVN, then pack and put to SRCS.
 3. Proceed further as usual.

For GIT, use a similar logic but with the appropriate variables `git_url` and `git_commit` and respective commands.

This way, no duplication takes place, no manual work is needed and it's always clear which revision the given RPM represents. This simplifies package managing a lot.

The .spec code for this is very simple, these are the corresponding parts from http://trac.netlabs.org/rpm/browser/spec/trunk/SPECS/which.spec?rev=429 which may be used as a template:

{{{
%define svn_url     http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/ports/which/trunk
%define svn_rev     733

Source: %{name}-%{version}-r%{svn_rev}.zip
}}}

{{{
%prep
%if %(sh -c 'if test -f ""%{_sourcedir}/%{name}-%{version}-r%{svn_rev}.zip"" ; then echo 1 ; else echo 0 ; fi')
%setup -q
%else
%setup -n ""%{name}-%{version}"" -Tc
svn export -r %{svn_rev} %{svn_url} . --force
rm -f ""%{_sourcedir}/%{name}-%{version}-r%{svn_rev}.zip""
(cd .. && zip -SrX9 ""%{_sourcedir}/%{name}-%{version}-r%{svn_rev}.zip"" ""%{name}-%{version}"")
%endif
}}}

I suggest to use this approach for all programs for which we maintain a SVN or a GIT repo (i.e. everything from http://trac.netlabs.org/ports/, for instance)."	enhancement	closed	major		spec files		high	fixed