Too many unowned directories

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:34:47 +0000, Richard wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 01:43:47PM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:11:30 +0000, Richard wrote:
> > > Why can't RPM deal with it?
> > 
> > Because it doesn't do it yet? ;)
> > Perhaps it's not even easy to implement in RPM's current code base?
> 
> Sure thing.  We should file a bug (feature enhancement really) against
> RPM and then forget about the unowned directories thing until that bug
> has been resolved one way or another.
> 
> I don't know if you agree with me, but I think the _right_ way to
> solve this is once in RPM, not 48235 times over in all the packages in
> Fedora.  Even if the RPM implementation is a bit tricky, it's surely
> easier than pushing this job down to every packager.

And meanwhile, package upgrades continue with creating empty _versioned_
%doc and include directories, for example. Orphaned empty includedirs
have broken non-mock builds of some tarballs before. /usr/share/doc
requires manual clean-up if you really want to browse it with tab
completion.

Yes, I agree, a fix in RPM would be nice to have -- though, it probably
won't fix "repoquery --whatprovides /path/dir" (or Yum's similar cmd).

Waiting for a fix in RPM is no excuse for packagers, however, who don't
know about %dir or recursive inclusion of directories, or who construct
hardly readable spec files which hide the %files lists behind lots
of macros which make it difficult to understand where files are stored.

In some packages, unowned directories appear not before a package becomes
desolate as packaging bugs pile up. A re-review would be justified, e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/473593

If packagers *and* reviewers need not care about unowned directories
anymore (perhaps because FESCo believes the umask fix is sufficient),
then the packaging guideline ought to be dropped.

Packagers and Reviewers at least ought to take a look at binary pkgs
files lists with "rpm -qlvp" or "rpmls" to understand a pkg's file
layout.