[Fedora-packaging] Re: Group tag in spec files

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Sun Sep 7 16:45:39 UTC 2008


On Sunday 07 September 2008, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 02:03:25PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> > On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 18:24 +0100, Tim Jackson wrote:
> > > Just a thought: perhaps the Packaging Guidelines should have a comment
> > > about formulating the "Group" tag in spec files? If nothing else they
> > > could tell you to go and read /usr/share/doc/rpm-*/GROUPS, but a bit of
> > > advice would probably be welcome there, especially for new
> > > contributors.
> >
> > Hmm, I know that we decided that we were not concerned with what went
> > into the Group tag, but I don't see this reflected in the guidelines
> > anywhere.
>
> We decided to ignore Grup tag --- literally :)
>
> How about just calling Group tag deprecated and to mention that
> upcoming rpm (>=F10) won't even require one.

My .02€:

Even though it would be (is?) deprecated, it's not quite dead yet: it's still 
mandatory in specfiles in current GA distro versions, it's still displayed 
by "rpm -qi", prominently there in repoview and most likely there's a bunch 
of other apps that use it for more or less important features to them (e.g. 
the last time I checked: synaptic), and it is required by LSB.  And it'll 
take a long long time until making it optional in F-10 will trickle down to 
other actively supported distro versions (think EL).

So IMHO it would be good to have *some* guidelines for its usage that 
encourage consistency.  I don't personally care exactly what that consistency 
means, be it a list of "valid" values or simply "Unspecified" as the only 
allowed value.  rpmlint currently looks at /usr/share/doc/rpm-*/GROUPS and 
whines if the Group is not listed in it, some more info and thoughts at 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/458460




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