[Fedora-packaging] Guidline change never announced?

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2010, Christoph Wickert wrote:

> Back in June we had some discussion about directory ownership
> of /usr/share/gtk-doc(/html) that was caused by
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=604169
>
> While there was no consensus on the mailing list and most people
> suggested to close this bug, things look different in the wiki now. Spot
> made a draft at
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/Revised_File_and_Directory_Ownership
> and it seems like this draft has become part of the packaging
> guidelines:
> https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Packaging%3AGuidelines&diff=157103&oldid=157099
>
> This raises a couple of questions for me:
>     1. (When) Was this ratified by the packaging committee? I don't see
>        anything on the lists, the wiki or in the meetbot archives
>     2. If it was ratified, was it announced? It is a major change in
>        the guidelines that every packager must be aware of.
>     3. Is this proposal been backed up by the RPM devs? AFAIR there
>        were problems with left over directories when the packages were
>        uninstalled in a single transaction but in the wrong order. Not
>        sure if it still applies.

As for 3) yes, we had a lengthy chat on the subject with Spot and others. 
Apparently some of my comments about multiple packages owning same 
directories being "bad" got taken a little too literally.

As long as /some/ package(s) owns a directory, they wont get left behind 
on uninstallation, and that's what really matters.

The ordering part is a whole different story. Rpm /could/ (but does not, 
currently) use directory hierarchy for additional ordering clues, this 
gives a nice natural order without everything having to explicitly require 
"filesystem" etc. Multiply owned directories cannot be use as ordering 
hints as they can and do mess ordering up massively. But that's all there 
is to it: rpm just needs to ignore such directories for ordering, and it 
needs to do so no matter what the Fedora guidelines are. If 20+ packages 
claim to own something like /usr/share/gtk-doc/html it Just Doesn't 
Matter, but if every single package owned /usr/bin or /usr/share, it would 
essentially mean the directory information cannot be used for ordering at 
all. Which is still just a lost opportunity for better install/remove 
order, not a "breaks rpm" situation.

 	- Panu -