[Fedora-packaging] dangling symlink vs file dependencies

[Vít Ondruch]

Hi,

I am trying to update rubygem-apipie-rails and on that occasion, I'm
going to unbundle the jquery. I did that by specifying "Requires:
js-jquery1" and replacing the original file by symlink. And now rpmlint
complains:

rubygem-apipie-rails.noarch: W: dangling-symlink
/usr/share/gems/gems/apipie-rails-0.3.4/app/public/apipie/javascripts/bundled/jquery-1.7.2.js
/usr/share/javascript/jquery/1/jquery.js
The target of the symbolic link does not exist within this package or
its file
based dependencies.  Verify spelling of the link target and that the
target is
included in a package in this package's dependency chain.


I could resolve this by "Requires: %{_jsdir}/jquery/1/jquery.js" and I'd
love to do it, but this practice is discouraged by guidelines. Now I am
wondering:

1) Is this reasonable to use the file dependnecy in this case, although
it is outside of /etc, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, or /usr/sbin directories?
2) Does this reasoning: "Using file dependencies outside of those
directories requires yum (and other depsolvers using the repomd format)
to download and parse a large xml file looking for the dependency."
still holds with recent move to DNF? Isn't time to drop this paragraph?
Isn't this "large xml" downloaded anyway for some reason? Do we know
what is the real benefit, if there is some?

Thanks


Vít



[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#File_Dependencies