I have 2 questions. The first one is brought to my attention by a first time reviewer and he has got an interesting point.

The guidelines at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Compiler_flags say: "Adding to and overriding or filtering parts of these flags is permitted if there's a good reason to do so; the rationale for doing so should be reviewed and documented in the specfile especially in the override and filter cases."

As you probably know that some packages add their own compiler flags on top of what we specified as %optflags. Until now, I did not do anything about these flags unless they override our %optflags. Now, having a second thought, I realized that the above statement can be interpreted in two ways:

1- The extra flags are added by the packager: This is the way I used to interpret the guideline, and I always document if I add additional flags on top of %{optflags} 2- The extra flags are added by the build script of upstream: Here is the question: Do we need to document such cases in the specfile? I know that we have hundreds (maybe thousands) of packages which don't document this case in the specfile. Are such packages violating the above guideline?

Second question: From the same link above: "Compilers used to build packages should honor the applicable compiler flags set in the system rpm configuration."

Does this apply to the stage where the compiler is doing the linking, i.e: "gcc -shared -lthis -lthat..."? Do we need to honor %optflags in this stage too? Again, I know many packages that don't pass %optflags to the compiler during the linking. Do these pakcages violate the guideline?

Orcan