Our static Libraries packaging guidelines once more

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:57:14 +0000, Adam wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 12:16 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 
> > Well, I think a reasonable alternative would be to add those policies to
> > the AutoQA infrastructure, and if the package fails the check, it
> > doesn't get tagged and the packager gets an email explaining the
> > failure. That will get things fixed up. ;)
> 
> The only problem with that is that just about every packaging guideline
> has _some_ valid exceptions (that's why they're all guidelines...) and
> it's rather hard to build exceptions into an automatic testing system in
> a way which doesn't get horribly crufty in a hurry.

If exceptions become a problem because they are applied to many packages,
it would still be possible to adjust the guidelines or mark the packages
with special metadata comments in their .spec files. Then packagers would
need to make use of an exception _explicitly_, showing that what they do
is intentional.

One example where the packager was mistaken about an exception in the
guidelines is "mpich2":
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=Violation+of+the+Packaging+Guidelines

 From the few tickets I had filed in early December (for early corner-cases),
only 60% have been fixed. No sign of activity in the remaining tickets.