[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 03.08.12 14:44, Panu Matilainen (pmatilai at laiskiainen.org) wrote:

> On 08/03/2012 02:02 PM, Kay Sievers wrote:
> >On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Peter Lemenkov <lemenkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>2012/8/3 Lennart Poettering <mzerqung at 0pointer.de>:
> >>>On Wed, 01.08.12 15:28, Tom Callaway (tcallawa at redhat.com) wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>A new section on Macros has been added to the Packaging Guidelines,
> >>>>covering Packaging of Additional RPM Macros.
> >>>>
> >>>>https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Packaging_of_Additional_RPM_Macros
> >>>
> >>>What's the rationale behind having these in /etc? This is hardly user
> >>>configuration, and only ever used if people build their own RPMs. We
> >>>really should try harder not to clutter /etc with stuff that is not
> >>>configuration.
> >>>
> >>>Why not have this somewhere below /usr?
> 
> Because rpm doesn't have a drop-in directory for macros anywhere in
> /usr, nobody has asked for one before this, and while I agree on
> "/etc admin purity" being a good thing generally, it has not been
> (and still isn't) enough of a reason to make it worth the pain for
> me to personally drive such a move.

OpenSUSE has this in /usr/lib/rpm/macros instead. Makes a lot of sense
to copy that scheme from them and making the delta between the distros
here a bit smaller.

I mean, I think RPM should look in /etc and in /usr/lib. But the
Guidelines should recommend the latter and not the former.

> >>Agree. We should install them into /usr/lib/rpm.
> >
> >Exactly. Static stuff installed by packages should not land in /etc.
> >It's a pain on updates when it's marked as config, and stuff goes
> >wrong all the time, because things in /etc invite everybody to edit
> >it, and boom. We really should try hard to leave /etc to the admin,
> >and not the OS vendor.
> >
> >And just in case that this will come up: all the bad prior art in /etc
> >should not be a reason to continue that road, it's not the right way,
> >and we can do better, and need to do better. :)
> 
> Well, adding support for something like /usr/lib/rpm/macros.d/ would
> be essentially a one-liner patch. Dealing with the consequences of
> moving things there is a whole lot more work, annoyance and
> distro-version incompatibilities however.

Well, it would increase compatiblity as the other big RPM distro uses
/usr/lib/rpm/macros for this already.

And I am not proposing that we should really move all macros from one
dir to the other immeidately. Instead I just believe RPM should look in
both places and the guidelines should suggest /usr and deprecate /etc
for this. That should be easy to do, and the transition would be easy
and "soft".

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.