Subpackages should own directories too?

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Mon May 22 22:19:15 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 23:25 +0200, Laurent Rineau wrote:

> However, if i compile and install then uninstall the two packages at once, the 
> directory %{_datadir}/foobar/ remains, and rpm says no package owns it (after 
> the uninstallation).

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/89500
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/190878#c4 (+rest of comments there)


> It is fixed if foobar-subpackage owns %{_datadir}/foobar/ too. However, 
> according to the guidelines: "Packages must not own files or directories 
> already owned by other packages."
> 
> Who is wrong, the guideline, my version of rpm, or me?

The guideline kind of assumes that rpm does proper erasure ordering, but
as far as I know, no FC version ships with such rpm.  Strictly speaking,
there are *lots* of packages around that may cause empty dirs being left
behind because of that (everything except "filesystem"?), and if the fix
for #89500 turns out as expected, the affected ones would be instantly
fixed without making any changes to packages and multi-ownership of dirs
(for this particular purpose) would become zero-value
specfile/rpmdb/repodata cruft.

In my opinion that's why the guideline should hold.  Micro-managing the
dirs in a few packages here and there doesn't help much at all in the
big picture.

#190878 above is a slightly different example because it involves a
dependency loop; in such cases it makes actually sense to apply
multi-ownership to dirs that are not owned by other packages outside of
the loop.




More information about the fedora-extras-list mailing list