RFC: fix summary text for lots of packages

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sunday 23 November 2008, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> Please do not add checks to rpmlint which have not been reviewed by FPC.

Of course I and others do and will.

1) rpmlint is not a project governed by FPC or any other Fedora entity.  There 
are no FPC members actively involved with rpmlint upstream development as far 
as I can tell.  The rpmlint community or anyone who can find convince them of 
a check's usefulness can get checks they find useful added to it.

2) I'm pretty sure FPC has not reviewed the existing set of enabled checks in 
rpmlint and I'm not aware of them planning to do so.

3) rpmlint does not exist exclusively for enforcing Fedora packaging 
guidelines.  It does and will always check things that are not in Fedora 
packaging guidelines as well as does not and will not check everything in 
them.  Fedora packaging guidelines are one positive driver for rpmlint's 
development but they are not nor will be something that slows down its 
development upstream at least as long as I'm involved there.  Especially 
something that is not mentioned at all in Fedora packaging guidelines (such 
as what we're discussing now) will not slow rpmlint's development down, and 
chances are that there are even some cases where checks that are actually 
against Fedora packaging guidelines will be added to it by someone.  In those 
cases, see 4) below.

4) If a check does not exist in rpmlint, it can't check that no matter how 
useful the check it is to someone.  If a check exists and you thinks it's 
harmful or produces too many false positives etc, there are a number of 
config files where you can use addFilter() and forget about it.  This can be 
done on project level too.  Who knows, it could be that the check I just 
added ends up being filtered in Fedora rpmlint's default config, but I know I 
(and from what I've read, probably others as well) want it to be done in my 
rpmlint runs nevertheless.  There's some work to be done in rpmlint to make 
things setups like this easier to configure but it can be done already today.  
Just to clarify, I am not going to filter the just added check out in the 
next rpmlint release unless "forced" by FPC.

Now, if FPC is not happy with the way I maintain the rpmlint package in 
Fedora, I'm sure they will contact me about it and we'll work it out some 
way.

> Packagers are taking rpmlint output as authoritative

Well, either those packagers are or I am mistaken.  The Fedora packaging 
guidelines don't say anything explicitly about rpmlint's authority but I 
think reading the rpmlint chapter in them makes its position pretty clear.

> and I don't see why 
> we should bother with FPC at all if you're taking policy in your hands.

Ahh, trolling again?  Sorry, I won't bite this time.  Or in case you're one of 
those packagers who I think are mistaken about what's 
policy/guidelines/authority and what's not, apologies for the troll 
accusation and see above.