Clarification on package review issues

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 05:58:42PM -0700, Jay Hankinson wrote:
>   Thanks for the quick response, spot. See below...
> On 6/29/10 5:25 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > On 06/29/2010 08:12 PM, Jay Hankinson wrote:
> >>   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?
> > If there is a valid reason for the ingres user to own those files, then
> > it is correct to do so as a defattr. Just be careful. :)
> Thanks, I will. :-)
> >> 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?
> > %files -f is permitted. You might find that things end up being more
> > complicated, especially if you have config files or locale files, as
> > your file list won't handle those properly.
> Indeed and I've had to add a few exceptions by hand. For most of the 
> files though, it's actually much easier for me to use the lists 
> generated from the existing (non-rpm) packaging info.

One thing to watch out for here is being able to change your file lists to
use macros.  ie: if your file list has the files:
  /usr/bin/ingresclient
  /usr/sbin/ingresserver

You'd need to modify them to have:
  %{_bindir}/ingresclient
  %{_sbindir}/ingresserver

Also be careful about config files and things that don't have the default
user/group.  For instance, %{_bindir}/ingresclient might need to have user
and group root.  So you'd need to modify the file list to have:

  %attr(0755, root, root) %{_bindir}/ingresclient

A config file, /etc/ingres/server.cfg would need to be modified to read:

  %config(noreplace) %{_sysconfdir}/ingres/server.cfg

Directories also need to be marked.  If you can't use wildcards in most
places, you'll need to explicitly list the directories which means changing
things like /usr/share/ingres into:

  %dir %attr(0755, root, root) %{_datadir}/ingres

-Toshio
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