On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 6:43 AM, Florian Festi <ffe...@redhat.com> wrote: > Hi! > > We are currently pondering about #417 [1]. For adding a %optional file > attribute that would allow adding file to to %files sections that may > not be built under some circumstances (e.g. some architectures). > > It is already perfectly legal to have files not listed explicitly if > they are within a directory that is included in the %file section. But > some packages (examples wanted) may have trouble using this due to the > way the package files are laid out. > > Otoh %optional would be another spec language key word that packagers > have to deal with and we as RPM upstream developers have a hard time > judging whether the benefit of the attribute really out weights the cost > of bloating the spec language. > > Any input - especially with real world packages that would benefit such > an addition - is welcome. >
I personally wouldn't use %optional in most cases, just like I avoid %missingok (the install-time counterpart to this). That said, I think it's a perfectly valid strategy for dealing with some types of content if you're trying to reduce/eliminate large clusters of ugly conditionals in the %files section (or writing scripts to generate files list manifests to pass to the files section). While you can absolutely go without this feature, I think that's more of a matter for distributions to consider. For example, SUSE allows for empty file manifests in their packages, while Fedora does not. And until a few months ago, rich dependencies were banned in Fedora, while they've been allowed in SUSE for a while. There are specs that do detection and analysis to fill in these entries via the manifest, which I consider to be no worse than the %optional tag for files section. This just reduces the need for writing potentially error-prone extra scripts for this. However, I'd like to see a warning thrown whenever a file listed as %optional is not included because it's not there, just so that information is captured and obvious when someone looks back through build logs or something. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ Rpm-ecosystem mailing list Rpm-ecosystem@lists.rpm.org http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-ecosystem
