Fedora 12 Features Proposed for Removal

[Kevin Kofler]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 1. He is running the autotools while building.

It's your personal opinion that this is "low quality", many other packagers 
don't agree with their assertion and the guidelines (intentionally) don't 
ban it.

FYI, all our KDE 3 packages reran the autotools during the build (KDE 3's 
"make cvs" feature) and our KDE 3 compatibility packages still do. (KDE 4 
doesn't use autotools, as you know.)

But we have had this discussion many times, it's getting boring. I'd really 
appreciate if you stopped using your personal opinion as examples of "bad 
packaging quality".

> 2. Some of his packages contain abuses of %*dir variables.
> e.g.:
> %post
> %{_bindir}/<someotherscript>

That's indeed unnecessary (why not just run the script without the absolute 
path?), but not invalid either.

> 3. Some of his packages don't honor rpm input %*dir variables
> (e.g. datadir), but rely on %{_prefix} only, despite they install to
> %{_datadir}

That one should be fixed, the guidelines say to use macros where possible, 
especially in cases like this. While %{_prefix}/share is not going to 
produce a broken package, %{_datadir} is better (because it can change, as 
unlikely as that is) and the reviewer should have pointed this out.

        Kevin Kofler