[Fedora-packaging] Re: Group tag in spec files

[Axel Thimm]

On Sun, Sep 07, 2008 at 07:45:39PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Sunday 07 September 2008, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 02:03:25PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 18:24 +0100, Tim Jackson wrote:
> > > > Just a thought: perhaps the Packaging Guidelines should have a comment
> > > > about formulating the "Group" tag in spec files? If nothing else they
> > > > could tell you to go and read /usr/share/doc/rpm-*/GROUPS, but a bit of
> > > > advice would probably be welcome there, especially for new
> > > > contributors.
> > >
> > > Hmm, I know that we decided that we were not concerned with what went
> > > into the Group tag, but I don't see this reflected in the guidelines
> > > anywhere.
> >
> > We decided to ignore Grup tag --- literally :)
> >
> > How about just calling Group tag deprecated and to mention that
> > upcoming rpm (>=F10) won't even require one.
> 
> My .02€:
> 
> Even though it would be (is?) deprecated, it's not quite dead yet: it's still 
> mandatory in specfiles in current GA distro versions, it's still displayed 
> by "rpm -qi", prominently there in repoview and most likely there's a bunch 
> of other apps that use it for more or less important features to them (e.g. 
> the last time I checked: synaptic), and it is required by LSB.  And it'll 
> take a long long time until making it optional in F-10 will trickle down to 
> other actively supported distro versions (think EL).
> 
> So IMHO it would be good to have *some* guidelines for its usage that 
> encourage consistency.  I don't personally care exactly what that consistency 
> means, be it a list of "valid" values or simply "Unspecified" as the only 
> allowed value.  rpmlint currently looks at /usr/share/doc/rpm-*/GROUPS and 
> whines if the Group is not listed in it, some more info and thoughts at 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/458460

We certainly can't afford to lose LSB compliance (I didn't knew
Groups: was referenced there), so indeed we need to step down a
bit. Most probably we can now just make people aware that we consider
the tag non-authoritative and while making best efforts to have its
content sane we advise using other sources of information like the rpm
metadata/comps stuff.

And about adding new tags/modifying old ones: I think we should
not. We should keep the current copy of GROUPS and try to fit the tags
in there to nearest proximity.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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