[Fedora-packaging] Is this allowed? Files and libs duplicated in subpackages

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 09/01/2013 03:09 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1003196
> 
> Based on this suspicious output
> 
> mate-dictionary  from  mate-utils provides
> libmatedict.so.6()(64bit) mate-utils  from  mate-utils provides
> libmatedict.so.6()(64bit) required by:
> mate-dictionary-devel-1.6.0-7.fc20.x86_64 required by:
> mate-utils-devel-1.6.0-7.fc20.x86_64
> 
> I've only verified in koji that lots of files are included in both 
> sub-packages. Even the descriptions overlap.
> 
> And there are even more subpackages, which only contain copies of 
> files included in the base mate-utils package already. Why is that
> done? Why aren't RPM dependencies used to have the base-package
> depend on the multiple subpackages?
> 
> So far, it has always been a packaging mistake to duplicate files
> (and their Provides as a consequence) in multiple subpackages.


Well, there are a few places where I can see duplicating files making
sense (but certainly not to the degree demonstrated in the mate packages).

For example, in the SSSD package, we duplicate the 'sssd_pac' libexec
binary in both the 'sssd-provider-ad' and 'sssd-provider-ipa' plugin
subpackages, rather than add useless metadata for an extra common
subpackage for both to depend on. It seems wasteful to have a whole
subpackage for one 150k binary.
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