Packaging committee report 2006-12-19

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

Logs of this meeting are available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/IRCLog20061219
Note that any linked drafts may not yet be updated with all of the
changes approved in the meeting.

A good meeting this week; we had 100% attendance and dealt with many
items.

The draft concerning the proper use of Provides: and Obsoletes: when
packages are named or replaced by packages of equivalent functionality
at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/ProvidesObsoletes was
considered first.  It was noted that the epoch should be added in a
few places.  There was discussion about how long to keep Provides: for
the old package name, and the decision was made that this should be
done for two releases.  The draft was approved with those changes.

The draft about scriptlets for updating the icon cache at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/ScriptletSnippets/iconcache
was considered next.  There was discussion about applicability to core
packages in FC6 and older (which isn't possible because xdg-utils is
in Extras).  The draft was approved with minor changes (which seem to
have already been made).

Next there was a quick vote on linking to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Debuginfo in the guidelines
and adding a requirement that commentary is required in the spec if
debuginfo generation is disabled.  The proposal was accepted.

We discussed package naming (and the jpackage naming in particular) as
it relates to the Core/Extras merge and the upcoming mass review.
Currently there are many packages which will not pass review because
the naming guidelines are violated, including a large number of
Java-related packages in core.  We discussed making a sweep through
the universe of packages to identify those with naming issues.  This
isn't strictly packaging committee territory, but nonetheless it needs
to be done, and volunteers are appreciated.

There was also some discussion about lower case package names; the
general sentiment was that we shouldn't try to mandate anything like
that.  There are many interesting issues there and the discussion will
probably return at some point.

We discussed how to properly indicate packages needing review; there's
a packagedb field, but in lieu of the packagedb we talked about
putting a file in CVS.  This is more FESCo territory and some us would
like to bring it up there.

We did a little work on the License: tag proposal; the general
sentiment is that we should keep the License: tag as simple as
possible.  (There was a message to the packaging list proposing a
structured field with various pieces of information, but this wasn't
accepted.)  An early draft proposal is at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/LicenseTag

 - J<