Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2012-12-19)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

-Toshio
On Dec 20, 2012 7:05 PM, "Adam Williamson" <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2012-12-20 at 18:54 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
> > A systemd-specific exception works for systemd, fine, but it doesn't
> > really seem to address the root problem.
>
> To further elaborate: the 'root problem', it seems to me, is that this
> 'Fedoraism' as Lennart calls it results in one of two things:
>
> 1) we have to carry downstream patches or spec file stuff to relocate
> things to /usr/libexec (and, possibly, tell other things that those
> things have been relocated) - which is against
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects
>
> or:
>
> 2) we have to pressure upstream projects to needlessly complicate their
> code and buildsystem with stuff like $libexecdir variables in their
> autofoo, which resolve to /usr/libexec on Fedora/RHEL but just /usr/lib
> or something on other distros - which is kind of an imposition on
> upstreams
>

Since neither of these things are required by the packaging guidelines, I
believe the premise of your argument is deeply flawed.

1) As i've said before, there is no packaging guideline requirement that
maintainers  restrict helper applications to libexec.  Helper apps can go
in either %{_libdir} or %{_libexecdir} (and really, helper apps should be
able to go in %{_prefix}/lib under a simple multilib exemption rather
easily now as well.)

2) the systemd exceptions allows placing files in %{_prefix}/lib rather
than %{_libdir} (the exceptions allow both putting the helper apps in there
which would generally be okay with just a multilib exception and the unit
files which are arch specific data and therefore usually go in %{_libdir}
and therefore needed a special exception).  The only reason people can drag
%{_libexecdir} in to this discussion is that helper binaries are allowed in
either %{_libdir} or %{_libexecdir}.  In the context of forcing people to
use a specific directory not specified by standards its meaningless because
%{_libdir} is a suitable alternative.

3) lennert is not asking that we give permission for packages to use
something other than %{_libexecdir} if upstream doesn't support it.  He's
asking us to forbid use of libexecdir within fedora packages no matter what
the package maintainer and upstream support.

-Toshio

> All this for the rather questionable benefit of having a specifically
> defined place for helper-scripts-not-meant-to-be-executed-directly,
> which gains us...what, exactly, over just putting them
> in /usr/lib/(appname) or /usr/share/(appname) or whatever? I don't see
> that libexec is actually giving us some kind of huge win to justify the
> inconveniences.
> --
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
> http://www.happyassassin.net
>
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