Ping: packaging committee. Does anyone have any comments on this proposal ?

@berrange

i'm not on the packaging committee, but I have a couple of doc suggestions.

specfile syntax highlighting

If you fence your specfile code snippets with:

[source, rpm-spec]
----
  .spec code here
----

Instead of ...., the code will be rendered syntax-highlighted which can make reading more comfortable.

Conditional mingw inclusion

Your example spec file contains,

%define with_mingw 0
%if 0%{?fedora}
    %define with_mingw 0%{!?_without_mingw:1}
%endif

Writing the condition this way will make it impossible for non-fedora users of the specfile to include mingw subpackages, even if they use rpmbuild --with=mingw.

To make the build as flexible as possible, I'd suggest setting the default based on the distro, using conditional %bcond_{with,without} calls. The %bcond_ macros will take care of defining with_mingw properly based on both the defaults plus the command line, and the %{with} macro can be used to check it later using the same argument that was passed to the %bcond_ macro.

IOW, if the specfile is written as...

%if 0%{?fedora}
  %bcond_without mingw
%else
  %bcond_with mingw
%endif
[...]
%if %{with mingw}
  (optional MinGW parts of the build...)
%endif

Then it'll always DTRT.

On Fedora:

• rpmbuild will make %{with mingw} test true
• rpmbuild --without=mingw will make %{with mingw} test false

On other distros:

• rpmbuild will make %{with mingw} test false
• rpmbuild --with=mingw will make %{with mingw} test true

@ferdnyc thanks for the suggestions, I've made those changes

That should probably be s/Experiance/Experience/?

This paragraph seems to be redundant with bullet point 4 from the previous section.

s/experiance/experience/

Other than those minor issues, looks good to me. Thank you for working on this!

This paragraph seems to be redundant with bullet point 4 from the previous section.

To an extent everything under this heading is redundant, but I felt it worth spelling it out explicitly. I'll simplify this second paragraph to just refer back to the earlier one.