Packaging question: /usr/share/gnome/help ownership

[Michel Salim]

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/usr/share/gnome/help is owned by yelp. According to the packaging
guidelines, section 1.35: File and Directory Ownership, use case 2:

"there are several instances where it's desirable for multiple packages
to own a directory. Examples of this are:
...
2) Multiple packages have files in a common directory but none of them
requires others.
...
In all cases we are guarding against unowned directories being present
on a system. Unowned directories are affected by the umask of the user
installing the package and thus can be a security risk or lead to
packages which won't run."

For GNOME packages, the consensus as expressed in existing packages
seems to be to assume that yelp is installed, and so individual packages
neither Requires: yelp (since the basic functionality does not depend on
it) nor own /usr/share/gnome/help. Is this not dangerous, though? For
instance, someone running an alternative desktop, and using yum to
install selected GTK/GNOME packages might end up with a dangling
/usr/share/gnome/help if yelp is never installed.

Should applications that put files under /usr/share/gnome/help be
required to own it (or depend on yelp)? In that case, there's a lot of
clean-up to do w.r.t. GNOME packages.

Thanks,

- --
Michel Salim
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