Bug reporting URL field in packages

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 17:37 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> Something like that is quite easily doable by adding a RPMTAG_BUGURL tag
>> extension which grabs its value from macro configuration if set, otherwise
>> use the contents from the package.
>>
>> It is out of scope for this discussion though, the question here is about
>> the default value Fedora packages should have. The BUGURL tag contents is
>> just a plain old string which is expanded from %bugurl macro at build time
>> and currently no further processing is done on it.
>
> I think what we would like to avoid is hardcoding it in the binary rpm.
> One of the goals of Fedora is to have our rpms used as is in downstream
> respins, where it would be inappropriate for the rpm to define our
> bugzilla as the bug filing location.  But if I get what you're saying
> right, you could have it hardcoded in the rpm for a case where it isn't
> defined (at least in part) in a macro file on the users's system, and
> when there is a macro file that defines it on the users's system, use
> that definition instead of the one in the rpm itself.  Is that what
> you're saying?

More or less, but note that an rpm level configurable override would be 
system global for all packages. When you enter 3rd party repositories into 
the picture such a scheme wont work at all, except if capturing everything 
is what what you want (eg some corporate IT department might want just 
that).

> We'd also want to avoid a flag day of mass rebuilding any time we want
> to change the landing point for people to query/file bugs for a package.

Well in that case rpm is the wrong place entirely, and ditto for respins 
controlling their own bug report URLs. For these you'd want the bug 
reporting URL in repodata instead: spins are creating their own 
repositories so they can set it there, and regenerating the repodata to 
include a new url is cheaper than rebuilding all the packages.

 	- Panu -