Packaging/Review Guidelines change

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 21:04 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> > As approved by FESCO today, the following change to the Fedora Extras
> > Packaging and Review Guidelines is now in effect:
> > 
> > MUST: Packages must not own files or directories already owned by other
> > packages. The rule of thumb here is that the first package to be
> > installed should own the files or directories that other packages may
> > rely upon.
> 
> What about directories owned by already existing packages, when the 
> already existing packages are not needed for the new package (and may 
> not be present on the target system) ?
> 
> Should a dep be added just to make sure the other existing package is 
> installed before the new one ?
> 
> Or do we allow packages to install files in directories which are not 
> owned by anything on the live system ?
> 
> Or should the shared directories be migrated to a central package like 
> filesystem (or the equivalent for extras) which will own them ?

An example of this would be tetex packages.
tetex packages install certain packages with /usr/share/texmf/doc so
that they are available to the texdoc command.

/usr/share/texmf/doc is owned by tetex-doc - a very large package that
many people don't wish to install.

Perhaps /usr/share/texmf/doc should be owned by the base tetex package,
but that's a core package - so the Red Hat maintainer would need to be
willing to do that. Or we could allow tetex packages to create it as an
un-owned directory (which I wouldn't have a problem with in this case)
if tetex-doc isn't installed.