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...
and it seems like this draft has become part of the packaging
guidelines:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Packaging%3AGuidelines&di...
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 -