rpms/gnumeric/FC-4 gnumeric.spec,1.3,1.4

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 14:04 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> 
> gnumeric not requiring mc _just works_. gnumeric requiring mc causes users
> to raise questions about dependency bloat. gnumeric owning a directory
> which belongs to a different package, is wrong. Twin ownership of files
> or directories is wrong.  You want a _single_ package to specify file
> ownership and access privileges, regardless of whether this is a
> corner-case or not. You want RPM database queries to not return ambigous
> results. Nobody has commented on my /usr/share/aclocal example yet.
> Well, go ahead and drive directory ownership and sub-package creation to
> the level of pedantry, without real benefit.

I agree with this.
While it may result in an orphaned /usr/share/mc directory - I think
that is the least problematic solution.

gnumeric should not depend upon mc because it does not need mc.
Creating a gnumeric-mc subpackage that depends upon mc would technically
be correct and resolve the problem - but it seems a bit rediculous to
me.

gnumeric has no business owning /usr/share/mc

What would be *nice* is if rpm had a concept of soft ownership - IE
delete the directory if nothing else is using it, but not reporting the
directory as owned by the package for purposes of a provides query. In
fact, it would be nice if it was automatic (IE rpm removes a file that
results in an unowned empty directory, it just removes the unowned empty
directory).

rpm does not do that, creating a sub package to work around a deficiency
in rpm is not the right solution because if that functionality is added
to rpm, then you either have a sub package that is a sub package for
legacy reasons, or you have to have a new release obsolete and provide
the sub package.

leaving dangling directories should be avoided whenever possible, but I
think its the best way to do it for this scenario.

-=-
With tetex packages - the packages own the doc directory so that they
uninstall cleanly if tetex-doc is not installed.

[mpeters at laptop ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/share/texmf/doc
tetex-prosper-1.5-2.fc4
tetex-perltex-1.2-2.fc4
latex2rtf-1.9.15-0.3
tetex-movie15-1.0-1.fc4
tetex-doc-3.0-6.FC4
tetex-fontools-20051003-1.fc4
[mpeters at laptop ~]$ 

Is that really what we want to have happen just to avoid an occasional
unowned directory after a package is removed?