[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/09/2010 07:43 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Thursday 09 December 2010, Tom Callaway wrote:
>
>> The guidelines have been updated to indicate that %doc files must not
>> have executable permissions.
>
> Why?

The issue Spot tries to address with this change, is to prevent rpm's 
dependency tracking from accidentally pulling-in deps, which aren't 
actually used by the actual package, originating from %doc files.

As rpm's dep-tracking tracks "executables", his approach is to 
indirectly achieve this by banning "executable %docs"[1].


>  If they (example scripts etc) don't add any dependencies that aren't
> already in the package's dependency chain,
"If" is the keyword.

The problem with this is that there currently is no tool to make sure 
they don't. Conversely, there repeatedly (and fairly frequently) have 
been packages, rpm's dep-tracking pulls-in such additional deps.

> what is the problem solved by this
> guideline,
C.f. what I wrote in my last sentence.

Rpm's dep-tracking doesn't track deps for non-executable files.
=> No additional deps.

> and how do you propose handling these files instead?
My guess is, Spot's answer will be "chmod -x 'em".

Ralf

[1] I voted against this proposal during the FPC meeting, because I 
consider this approach to be too radical and to be playing with 
symptoms, without fixing the actual causes of the issues behind them.