On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 13:39 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 03:58:26PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 24.11.10 03:02, Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger(a)gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > A question I'd have when looking over a proposed packaging guideline would
> > be: why %ghost the directories? Why not include the directories as normal
> > but add the tmpfiles.d step in addition?
>
> Well, because rpm has introduced %ghost for cases like this, and everybody
> else uses it for that.
>
%ghost is definitely suitable for files but I'm not so sure it's suitable
for directories. It certainly leads to more complex spec files to use
%ghost on the directory for really no gain that I'm aware of. %ghost does
%two things with a file: It tells rpm that it doesn't need to install the
file. It tells rpm to not track the contents of the file while still
tracking the permissions and ownerhsip of the file.
It's also worth noting that %ghost tells rpm -V that it's ok if the
file/dir. is missing (or changes type) ... which we _don't_ want to
happen.