Packaging guidelines updates

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

Hi folks, your friendly neighborhood packaging guy here. I've got a
couple of items to let you know about.

1. Recently, there was some question raised about whether or not we
should be including the text of licenses in binary packages.
Specifically, concern was raised that the GPL did not require this. Greg
took this specific question to Red Hat Legal, and their response was
that it is a requirement of the GPL that either the full 
license or the link to the license be included -- but Red Hat Legal
recommend including the full license text as a best practice. They
advised us to keep this guideline as a "MUST" in the case of the GPL.

Rather than submit every possible license to legal to see whether or not
they would advice us to include the text or not, I proposed to the
Fedora Extras Steering Committee (FESCO) that we keep the guideline as
it is, and require all licenses used in a package to be included in text
format, as %doc, in the %files section of that package. The proposal
passed.

This is MUST item number 7 in the Things To Check On Review section in
the PackageReviewGuidelines:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageReviewGuidelines#head-05a78c7ca440544397657679f87fbdbd84d9be28

2. I also proposed an addition to the PackagingGuidelines regarding
desktop applications. Specifically, I proposed to FESCO that all
packages containing GUI applications should also include a properly
installed %{name}.desktop file. Ideally, this file will come from
upstream, but if it is not included by default, the packager should add
it as a Source#:. For the purposes of this rule, a GUI application is
defined as anything which draws a window in X and then operates from
within that window. If you do not feel that your GUI application needs
a .desktop file, you need to rationalize its absense with a comment in
the .spec file.

This proposal was approved by FESCO.

You can find more information about this here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingGuidelines#desktop

This is MUST item number 31 in the Things To Check On Review section in
the PackageReviewGuidelines:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageReviewGuidelines#head-05a78c7ca440544397657679f87fbdbd84d9be28

If you have any questions about these items, feel free to ask me or on
fedora-extras-list.

Summary (for those who didn't want to read everything above):
- Yes, you have to include the license text(s) in %doc for every package
- You now have to include a properly installed %{name}.desktop file for
every GUI application. 

~spot
-- 
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Senior Sales Engineer || GPG ID: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!