Summary of the 2009-01-20 Packaging Committee meeting

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 02:18:23PM -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> *  Explicit Requires
>  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/ExplicitRequires
>  * Note that this contains an additional section about commenting
>    non-obvious items in spec files.

... which says:

  "Anything in the spec file which is not obvious should have a
  comment explaining it.

  Some examples of non-obvious items include (but are not limited to):

    * Some explicit requires
    * FHS violations
    * Changes to optflags
    * Not using %configure or make install
    * Provides/Obsoletes
    * Modified tarballs
    * Licensing or legal related changes"

I trust these are really just examples, not a list of things that have
to be commented on.  And that reviewers who are blindly running
through the guidelines and not paying much attention won't treat this
as a bullet list of must-have comments.

All MinGW packages violate FHS [previously discussed ad nauseam] by
using /usr/i686-pc-mingw32.  We also use a custom %_mingw32_configure
macro instead of %configure.  %configure isn't useful for non-autoconf
packages, or for packages which have a ./configure script that isn't
autoconf-generated.  In fact "make install" won't work on packages
that don't use make.

Apart from creating unnecessary make-work for packagers, I wonder what
the point of this is.  A better guideline would just have this
sentence and nothing else:

  "Anything in the spec file which is not obvious to a competent
  packager familiar with the relevant guidelines should have a
  comment explaining it."

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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