fedora.us QA, Vendor, Packager and more

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 00:36:02 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:

> What to put for 
> Packager:
>  and 
> Vendor:
> when doing a spec file from scratch and when reusing a spec file ?

Nothing.

Delete these fields if you derive an existing package. Mention the
previous packager's name in a changelog entry.

"Packager:" is not used, since the packager or the packagers are
mentioned in the changelog entries. That also has the good side-effect,
that your name would not appear in the header (rpm -qi) of a bad binary
package rebuilt by someone else.

"Vendor:" is set automatically by the build system.

> I think this should be explained in the QA.

It is not related to package quality.
 
> What to put in the %changelog ?

Sum up your modifications to the spec file. E.g. things like added/removed
patches and their purpose, changes in %build, %install and other sections,
experimental changes and their expected results.

> Especially when reusing a spec file, should the entries be kept ?

Cannot be answered in general. If the changelog contains entries which are
about several years old package revisions and in particular several years
old software releases, they can be deleted. Similarly, if you modify a
package heavily, check whether any of the very old entries may be of
interest any longer. But generally it's good habit to document the
life-time of a package and not delete entries in the log too soon.
 
> It also seems to me that some guidelines could be given about that.

Get inspiration from existing packages.
 
> On the completly different subject I would like to package a pam module, 
> but it should install in 
> /lib/security
> 
> There is no macro for this directory, nor for /lib. Is it on purpose ?

There's %_lib :)  But I would look whether the main pam package uses
%_lib or /lib.

> There seems to be the same for /bin. Of course it is still possible to use the
> paths but maybe a macro could be usefull there ?