rocky/rpms — comment on commit 84ad492450de5d34a89356189ea0c75884966270
File: specs/bashdb/bashdb.spec line 12
By zyv:

> The way I'd prefer to do it is as a "RHEL5" branch in git.

That works reasonably well if you are only maintaining one SPEC file (check it out how Fedora handles this), but in our case it will turn into a horrible maintenance nightmare for 2-3 active packagers we have to look after ~4000 packages.

> Rather I think of the two specs as independent and in the unlikely case that a change in one needs to be applied both places, git can accommodate that rather nicely.

Mostly there is no need for a large amount of conditionals, so they are quite maintainable as is, and in very rare cases where substantial rewrites are necessary, we just maintain several SPEC files in parallel. If we'd go for multiple branches, it means that in order to bump the spec for all supported platforms same changes will have to be replicated 3-4 times by hand or by merging, and couple of conditionals just don't justify this overhead.