[Fedora-packaging] Is this allowed? Files and libs duplicated in subpackages

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 08:38:42AM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
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> On 09/01/2013 03:09 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1003196
> > 
> > Based on this suspicious output
> > 
> > mate-dictionary  from  mate-utils provides
> > libmatedict.so.6()(64bit) mate-utils  from  mate-utils provides
> > libmatedict.so.6()(64bit) required by:
> > mate-dictionary-devel-1.6.0-7.fc20.x86_64 required by:
> > mate-utils-devel-1.6.0-7.fc20.x86_64
> > 
> > I've only verified in koji that lots of files are included in both 
> > sub-packages. Even the descriptions overlap.
> > 
> > And there are even more subpackages, which only contain copies of 
> > files included in the base mate-utils package already. Why is that
> > done? Why aren't RPM dependencies used to have the base-package
> > depend on the multiple subpackages?
> > 
> > So far, it has always been a packaging mistake to duplicate files
> > (and their Provides as a consequence) in multiple subpackages.
> 
> 
> Well, there are a few places where I can see duplicating files making
> sense (but certainly not to the degree demonstrated in the mate packages).
> 
> For example, in the SSSD package, we duplicate the 'sssd_pac' libexec
> binary in both the 'sssd-provider-ad' and 'sssd-provider-ipa' plugin
> subpackages, rather than add useless metadata for an extra common
> subpackage for both to depend on. It seems wasteful to have a whole
> subpackage for one 150k binary.
>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines?rd=Packaging/Guidelines#DuplicateFiles

So that would also be a packaging mistake.  It's been many years since this
was last touched though.  IIRC, mschwendt raised the last issue with it so
he may be best able to recall the justifications for this rule and whether
the FPC should consider relaxing it.

-Toshio
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