Clarification on package review issues

[Jay Hankinson]

  Hello Fedora Devs,

I'm currently going through the pre-review process for adding Ingres to 
the Fedora distribution 
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=578024). I'm getting some 
conflicting information for a couple of issues and I was hoping for some 
clarification.

Firstly, "%defattr()". The standard says it should be 
"%defattr(-.root,root-)" unless there is a good reason for it not to be. 
The vast majority of the files included in the Ingres packages are owned 
by the user 'ingres', which seems (IMHO) to be a good reason to use 
"%defattr(-,ingres,ingres,-)".  One reviewer disagreed, one agreed this 
was probably OK but that I should check. What's the consensus here?

Next, use of -f in the %files section. There are over 1700 files between 
the 4 RPMs and the ownership and permission for each file is maintained 
by one of the build tools. The file lists are generated as part of the 
build process, not stored statically in the source. In order to add the 
file lists to the SPEC files, I would need to do full build of the exact 
same source outside of RPM, generate the files list, add them to SPEC 
file and then run the RPM build. This is a fairly large over head for 
each update and makes maintenance a much larger task and much more 
susceptible to human error. By using the -f flag, I can generate the 
lists at build time using the existing manifest and they will always be 
correct. %files -f is also used by PostgreSQL so it's not completely 
outlawed. Am I OK to use it?

Thanks in advance for your help.

J

Jay Hankinson
Emerging Technologies Team
Ingres Corp
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