[Fedora-packaging] How to deal with folders that need the user to change permissions on?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thursday 15 March 2007, Axel Thimm wrote:

> A workaround would be to not own this folder which is very ugly,
> violates guidelines, leaves orphaned folders behind, and is just not
> The Right Solution. Which is The Right Solution?

Well, if I understand correctly, considering that fiddling with the 
permissions of this dir is required for the purpose of enabling mediawiki to 
create files in it, and those created files will not be owned by the 
mediawiki package in any case and will be left behind on package erase (ditto 
the dir if there are files in it, dir owned or not), I don't think leaving it 
unowned would be anywhere near a cardinal sin either.

In fact, it sounds much better to me than changing permissions of packaged 
files - package upgrades reset permissions of files, %config or not.  Ditto 
rpm --setperms/--setugids.  Which is why IMHO the answer to the original 
question is "don't even try to require changing permissions/ownership of 
packaged files, find a better way around the problem".

Marking the dir as %ghost and experimenting how it behaves then could also be 
of (mostly academic) interest.