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