[Fedora-packaging] Requires(hint):

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 02:10 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Hm ... so this committee takes it as a given that the maintainer of
> RPM can arbitrarily reject any committee decision.

Tom, 

I think you're misunderstanding our "lack of backbone" here. In the
recent past, we've generated patches for RPM to fix "obvious bugs",
submitted them upstream, and had them rejected without alternative
suggestions (aside from flame wars). In many cases, our "obvious bugs"
are described by upstream as features.

The Fedora RPM maintainers (who are actually RPM's upstream as well)
don't want to carry these patches either, taking an "upstream or
nothing" approach to this.

In addition, when we've suggested fixes to RPM, we've gotten the
feedback of "is it in the Packaging Guidelines"? Accordingly, we've
adopted the strategy that:

1. It is not in the Packaging Committee's mandate (or ability) to be
able to force patches into RPM.
2. The next best thing is to make guidelines which describe how RPM
should/must be used in Fedora.
3. When applicable, the Packaging Committee will make suggestions based
around our guidelines to RPM upstream in the hopes that our guidelines
will be made obsolete.

For example, it is only now that RPM is working on setting a default
BuildRoot, something we set guidelines for over a year ago.

~spot