odd file requires

Jonathan Underwood jonathan.underwood at gmail.com
Mon Nov 9 17:33:52 UTC 2009


2009/11/9 Todd Zullinger <tmz at pobox.com>:
> Seth Vidal wrote:
>> Take a look through, see if you see a package you're responsible for
>> and, if you can, figure out a way to not need the file-requires.
>
> In the case of puppet (and probably some of the others listed in the
> /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp section), puppet provides an emacs file,
> but it also owns %{_datadir}/emacs so as not to require emacs.  AFAIK,
> since puppet provides this file, the filelists don't need to be
> downloaded to resolve the dep.  At least, I don't recall ever seeing
> it download them when I've installed or updated puppet.
>
> In the bug requesting the puppet emacs/vim stuff¹, I did ask whether
> making subpackages was preferable to including them in the main
> package and owning the common dirs.  I still could go either way on
> that.  No one else on Cc: in the bug seemed to have an opinion.
>

Note that presently the emacs add-on packaging guidelines do demand
separate sub-packages for the elisp files. However a number of
packages do exactly as you've done. I am in the process of reviewing
and reworking the emacs packaging guidelines and the next iteration in
that process (after the currently proposed revision - see
fedora-packaging list) will be to propose a guideline to deal with
this situation more pragmatically.

When a package adds a one or two elisp files, it does seem like
overkill to force them into a subpackage, IMO. Certainly Debian has an
exception for this case allowing them to be installed without
requiring emacs (which then forces a directory ownership as you
describe).

At the moment I'm thinking that the best approach is a variant of the
above, where a package can install files into
%{_datadir}/emacs/site-lisp/foo without requiring emacs, and so it
will own %{_datadir}/emacs/site-lisp/foo, but not
%{_datadir}/emacs/site-lisp/

J.




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