review-o-matic : Fedora package review helper

[Ville Skyttä]

On Friday 17 October 2008, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "PD" == Patrice Dumas <pertusus at free.fr> writes:
>
> PD> Unless I am wrong, rpmlint is not a checked for fedora package
> PD> guidelines, it is distribution agnostic, simply a tool for
> PD> checking common errors in rpm packages.
>
> Well, Ville does update (or patch, I'm not sure) our rpmlint to
> correspond to our guidelines.  For example, verification of the
> License: tag matches exactly the licenses from
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing and the syntax rules in
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines (module
> any delay in getting updates to those pages propagated into the code).

That's right.  If necessary, we'll patch rpmlint in Fedora for Fedora needs, 
but I'd much rather make changes upstream.

The good thing is that a lot of the changes we've historically made in Fedora 
rpmlint have been found desirable in rpmlint upstream as well - other distros 
have found them useful too.  Compared to vanilla upstream, we currently have 
only two patches (one of which could actually be applicable upstream) and our 
own config in the Fedora package.  The license checks are a good example of 
this (and to give credit where it's due, it was spot who implemented them) - 
the code to check stuff is upstream and we just maintain the list of 
Fedora-approved license identifiers in config files in the Fedora package.

I'm sure that there are a lot of things that are not at all Fedora specific 
that rpmlint doesn't currently check but very well could.  Please do send 
patches either to Bugzilla or upstream rpmlint Trac, or just file RFE's 
(these usually preferably in upstream Trac) in case you have good ideas but 
no code yet.

The two things I'd like people to keep in mind when submitting rpmlint RFE's 
are that 1) ideally checks should be made as generic as feasible so we can 
maintain them upstream (but that doesn't have to prevent submitting entirely 
Fedora specific ones in Bugzilla), and 2) apart from some very specific 
checks on installed packages, the unit of work for rpmlint is one package.  
I'm not aware of any plans to change that (nor do I really know if it'd be a 
good direction for rpmlint), so some RFE's/bug reports may be rejected if 
getting them done would require knowledge of other packages than the one 
currently being checked.  Good patches are of course one way to change 
that ;)