[Mageia-dev] Over-zealous rpmlint policy (rejecting rt)

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Buchan Milne at 12/01/12 11:39 did gyre and gimble:
> On Thursday, 12 January 2012 11:55:07 Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Buchan Milne at 12/01/12 09:12 did gyre and gimble:
>>> I don't see why we shouldn't ship dirs in /usr/local ...
>>
>> I don't really see the point in shipping the dirs personally.
>>
>> Any separate extension that is packaged should not go into /usr/local
>> anyway,
> 
> No one ever said they would, you snipped the part of my mail saying that 
> 'locally installed' customisations, IOW, ones not managed by the package 
> manager etc., go there.

Yeah I know I was just trying to be explicit and clear with my reply and
reasoning. I wasn't pointing out something you missed or anything. Sorry
for the confusion (the opposite of what I had intended!)

>> so these folders are purely for users doing this manually.
> 
> Yes. And that's why we provide /usr/local/share/applications?

Hmm, that seems a bit silly to me. Why do we provide that? I'd say we
should drop it unless someone can argue otherwise (maybe it's part of
the filesystem layout spec?)

>> I would expect that the "make install" stage of any extension
>> installation would automatically create those folders anyway, so I
>> really don't see the benefit of adding these empty folders into a
>> package.
> 
> So, why would 'make isntall' of rt, which has been configured to itself live 
> in a system location, explicitly create these directories?

Because it's broken? Just because the upstream folks do something like
that does not mean they are correct. I'd say that if any app's make
install is writing things outside of their --prefix (with a few
exceptions for things like udev rules etc. that need to live in /lib -
but thankfully with the work done by Fedora folks even this exception is
dying away) or --sysconfdir etc. then it's broken.

>> The gain in doing so seems minimal to the point of useless.
> 
> I can remove the dirs in the package, but also, what is the benefit? On a 
> system dedicated to running a request tracking system, should we explicitly 
> make it more difficult to run said system that it would be if installed from 
> source?

I really don't buy the "make it more difficult" argument... that's what
I was trying to highlight in my previous mail. The "make install" stage
of any extension should make the dirs for you anyway... If that's the
case it is precisely the same difficulty as without those dirs. If
manual copying is required, then, yes, it is a tiny amount more
complicated, but people will be following instructions anyway and if the
added "complication" of a mkdir command or two will trip someone up,
then I don't think that person should have root powers and able to write
in /usr/local in the first place if this is their level of skill!!!


Like I say, this is just my opinion, and I certainly don't feel super
strongly on the topic. It's just that I wouldn't expect any rpm to own
anything in /usr/local tree (and that goes for the one you pointed out
above too!).

Col




-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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