packaging-committee

#678 Ban use of directory Requires
Closed: nothingtodo Opened by ignatenkobrain.

Closed: nothingtodo
Reopen Issue

It's quite common that other packages own same directory, there's no problem for it. Which means you will end up with different packages installed on system...

For example, gallery3 co-owns /etc/httpd/conf.d which makes perl-HTML-Mason to pull it instead of httpd-filesystem.

perl-HTML-Mason has Req: %{_sysconfdir}/httpd/conf.d

Requires by files are completely safe, but by directories they can cause some weird behavior. For example, there are tons of pkgs which own /usr/lib64/girepository-1.0, but if you want really to get real owner for this directory, you should use gobject-introspection%{?_isa} instead of direct directory requirement since it will pull any random package which owns this dir.

Unfortunately I don't have time for writing guidelines for this... But it should be quite easy, 1 paragraph somewhere.

I disagree with this. After all, multiple packages can Provides: foo and we aren't going to ban, well, all dependencies.

Any guideline here would have to be more nuanced than "ban all dependencies on directories".

We discussed this at this weeks meeting (http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2017-02-09/fpc.2017-02-09-17.01.txt):

  • 678 Ban use of directory Requires (geppetto, 18:13:00)

  • Minimal guideline change needed, if any. Mostly agree that solving
    this should happen by fixing the packaging that has many many owners
    of dirs. that are really owned by a single package. (geppetto,
    18:18:14)
  • ACTION: ignatenkobrain To think about a way we could automatically
    detect this on the provider side, and have a autoQA/taskotron thing.
    (geppetto, 18:23:32)

Metadata Update from @james:
- Issue assigned to tibbs

Metadata Update from @tibbs:
- Issue close_status updated to: None
- Issue tagged with: meeting

Note that given what we're doing in #632 I'm not sure there's anything left to do here. Basically we've tightened up the language to point out that requiring a directory is only guaranteed to give you a directory, not any specific package or files within that directory.

We discussed this at this weeks meeting (http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2017-03-02/fpc.2017-03-02-17.00.txt):

  • 656 version guidelines major simplification for the git era
    (geppetto, 17:09:37)
  • LINK: https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/issue/656 (geppetto,
    17:09:46)
  • LINK: https://pagure.io/pagure/issue/1933 (tibbs, 17:19:03)
  • ACTION: version guidelines major simplification for the git era
    (+1:6, 0:0, -1:0) (geppetto, 17:21:23)

Metadata Update from @james:
- Issue untagged with: meeting
- Issue tagged with: hasdraft, writeup

Metadata Update from @james:
- Issue untagged with: hasdraft, writeup
- Issue tagged with: needinfo

At this point I'm just going to close this. I don't see going further than what's already in #632, which ended up being pretty close to a prohibition anyway.

Metadata Update from @tibbs:
- Issue close_status updated to: nothingtodo
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

Metadata Update from @tibbs:
- Issue untagged with: needinfo
Metadata
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