yum update failed today with....

Dennis Gilmore dennis at ausil.us
Wed Apr 25 17:03:30 UTC 2012


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On Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:51:49 -0400
Jonathan Kamens <jik at kamens.us> wrote:

> On 4/25/2012 12:47 PM, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > Isn't it common to also include the directories you want to place
> > files into?
> >
> > $ rpm -ql google-chrome-stable | grep /bin
> > /usr/bin
> > /usr/bin/google-chrome
> No. This is not correct packaging.
> 
> It is reasonable for an RPM to /require /the presence of the system 
> directories it uses as prerequisites before it can be installed, so
> that if the filesystem layout changes in a way that the RPM doesn't
> expect, it will refuse to install (which is correct behavior).
> 
> It is /not/ reasonable for an RPM to /include/ shared directories
> that it does not own. Files and directories should only be owned by a
> single RPM.
> 
> On my system, there are only four RPMs (out of 3616) that provide 
> /usr/bin: VirtualBox, filesystem, google-earth-stable, and 
> google-chrome-stable. It is telling that three of these four RPMs are 
> third-party RPMs. Their maintainers are shipping buggy RPMs and they 
> should fix them.
> 
> This is generally a sign that they were lazy when writing their spec 
> files... Instead of constructing the %files section of the spec file 
> carefully to include only the files they actually own, they just put
> "*" in the spec file to include the entire contents of the install 
> directory. Yuck.

actually a * would have been preferable  what they would have used is
%{_bindir}  they should have done %{_bindir}/* so they own whats in
there but not the directory itself if they jsut used something like /*
they would also own /usr  but its very buggy packaging.

Dennis
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