Re: conf.avail, rpmlint and the FHS

[Nicolas Mailhot]

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Le dimanche 26 octobre 2008 à 21:30 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
>  Hi all,
>  
>  When conf.avail was introduced in fontconfig we at Fedora mostly ignored
>  it and let font packages install their fontconfig rules directly in
>  conf.d
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/FontsSpecTemplate
>  (the exception being the fontconfig package itself who perforce followed
>  the new conventions).
>  
>  Recent events made me revisit this point and try to heal the rift
>  between fontconfig and font packages by following common conventions.
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/Fonts_spec_template_correct...
>  
>  In the course of the examination of this guideline change proposal,
>  however, it was identified that conf.avail as currently designed causes
>  our rpmlint package sanity check tool to emit errors. Those errors were
>  ok for Behdad to ignore, but really not ok for general packaging
>  guidelines we want to put into newbie packager hands.
>  
>  The core reason are that since we deploy policy through those fontconfig
>  files, we absolutely do not want users to change them (they're free to
>  un-reference the files in conf.d, or write their own fontconfig rules in
>  different files, but we instruct rpm to stomp on old versions of our
>  files on updates). Since we mark those files as non-modifiable (%config
>  and not %config(noreplace) in rpm speak) rpmlint considers them as data,
>  not configuration, and complains of their location under /etc.
>  
>  After thinking a bit about it I feel rpmlint is right — since we don't
>  let users modify our fontconfig files they're not dynamic configuration,
>  just static data users can choose to activate or not.
>  
>  We could of course add an exception in rpmlint just for conf.avail, but
>  I'd rather have fontconfig be fixed to follow more closely the FHS.
>  Exceptions ultimately pile on till you have a lot of cruft to clean up
>  which is not my definition of fun.
>  
>  Can conf.avail and its contents be moved in /usr/share/something in the
>  next version of fontconfig?
>  
>  See also:
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Minutes/20081021
>  
>  Regards,
>   
-- 
Nicolas Mailhot