[Fedora-packaging] --vendor fedora, rationale/motivation?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 02:08 -0500, Christopher Aillon wrote:

Some food for thought below.

> If you are 
> distributing a GNOME desktop file, it should be --vendor gnome.

What is "a GNOME desktop file"?  A .desktop file included with an app
that is distributed from gnome.org?  A .desktop file for an app
distributed from somewhere else but uses GNOME libraries?  Something
else?

If I can identify an upstream vendor prefix with sufficient confidence
but make heavy modifications to the .desktop file they ship, should I
preserve the upstream vendor prefix or change it?

If the upstream vendor changes, for example in the case of an app
previously distributed by an "independent" vendor gets rolled into GNOME
proper, should the vendor identifier of the .desktop file I ship change
too?

>   If 
> there is no .desktop file and you write one, then it should be --vendor 
> fedora.

After the .desktop file I wrote and included in package version X gets
included in the X+1 upstream version and I update the package to that,
do I leave the desktop vendor prefix as is to "fedora" or sync it with
the upstream vendor name?

> The wiki should be updated to reflect this.

I don't think it's quite that clear cut.

GNOME and self-written .desktop files are from the easier end of cases
even though as shown, they're not entirely trivial either, but there's
lots of cases where upstream ships a .desktop file and inventing a sane
vendor string would be harder.

Quite frankly, I think the "always use fedora" approach is a
sufficiently low-problem one.  Or maybe make it "if upstream doesn't
clearly indicate their vendor identifier (eg. through a
desktop-file-install invocation in their Makefiles), use fedora, and
whatever you choose, make sure the vendor prefix won't change between
package revisions".

See also the last two paragraphs of the "Merging" chapter at
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-latest.html#merge-algorithm