Brief (and early) ode to fedpkg

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(a)gmail.com  martin(a)laptop.org -- School Server Architect  - ask interesting questions  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff