Summary of 2007-03-13 Packaging Committee meeting

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

Meeting minutes and full logs of the packaging meeting which occurred
on 2007-03-13 are online:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Minutes
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Minutes20070313

Executive summary:

The following drafts are now official guidelines, having been accepted
by FESCO last week:

 * Firmware Packaging guidelines:
   https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2007-February/msg00292.html

 * Disallowing %config files under /usr:
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/UsrConfigs

They should be written into the guidelines soon, if that hasn't
already been done.


Issues pending FESCO ratification:
 * Codifying when it is safe for the various phases of the RPM build
   process to write to various directories (8 yea, 1 nay):
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDraft/ScriptletsWriteDirs

 * Prepping BuildRoot for %install (8 yea, 1 nay):
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/BuildRootHandling


Misc business:

 * Guidelines for packaging Ruby Gems:
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/RubyGems
   Please provide insight on this; there are a number of packages
   queued up awaiting guidelines, including Rails.

 * Modifying the Perl specfile template to include
   BuildRequires: perl(ExtUtils::MakeMaker)
   to cope with the perl-devel split.


Please see the minutes and IRC log for complete information.

Note that I have combined the minutes and IRC log together to see how
it looks, but I don't think I will use it in the future because it
wiki interface just makes it too annoying to edit.  (It takes 30
seconds to load the preview, for example.)

This message contains official notice of changes to the guidelines,
but I'm concerned that it's not sufficiently prominent (and doesn't
include the actual text of changes).  I have considered sending
separate announcements for each change which is written into the
guidelines (or asking the driver of each change to do so).  Would it
be better to do that, or is this message sufficient?

 - J<