fedora.us QA, Vendor, Packager and more

[Toshio]

On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 18:36, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have some questions about spec files.
> 
> What to put for 
> Packager:
Shouldn't be used.  Use %packager Patrice Dumas <patrusus at free.fr> in
you ~/.rpmmacros file instead.

>  and 
> Vendor:
> when doing a spec file from scratch and when reusing a spec file ?
> 
I always leave it out.  I think it's a tag that's lost meaning due to
lack of definition.  Does anyone know different?  Or have a use for it?

> I think this should be explained in the QA.
> 


> What to put in the %changelog ?
> Especially when reusing a spec file, should the entries be kept ?
> 
I usually look at the entries and make a judgement based on how many
people edited the spec before me, how radically I'm changing it, and
other "fuzzy-logic" :-)  I definitely try to attribute the work done by
those who went before me, but if I'm rewriting most everything anyway, I
don't keep much of the previous entries.

If it's a RedHat spec originally, I tend to keep all the previous
entries.  But then, using a RedHat spec is something I'm only doing
because I'm updating something that's already in Fedora and I expect RH
to update in the future so it's in everyone's interest to stay as close
to the RH spec as possible.  (I believe RH has an internal policy of
keeping changelog's for some number of years, but I'm not sure how
many.)

One note: if you run rpmlint over your SRPM and binary RPM (as you
should) it'll mention that there's a semi-standardized way to format the
headers of changelogs:
* Sat Jan 31 2004 [NAME] [HUMAN PARSABLE EMAIL] - 0:0.7.13-0.fdr.1
where the string of numbers is an epoch, version, release tag.

> It also seems to me that some guidelines could be given about that.
> 
> On the completly different subject I would like to package a pam module, 
> but it should install in 
> /lib/security
> 
> There is no macro for this directory, nor for /lib. Is it on purpose ?
> There seems to be the same for /bin. Of course it is still possible to use the
> paths but maybe a macro could be usefull there ?

I'd be interested to hear the reason as well.  I've used :
/%{_lib}
with the leading slant.  I think I got this from RH's db4 spec.

-Toshio
-- 
Toshio <toshio at tiki-lounge.com>