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.

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.

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

On Monday 08 September 2008, Axel Thimm wrote: > 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. Regarding the LSB, I don't know whether the format of packages produced by rpm in current Fedora releases is LSB compliant even without any Group tag changes. If it is, I suppose making Group optional in specfiles does not necessarily mean losing LSB compliance, rpmbuild could just insert some fixed string as its value in the package headers it produces if the tag is not present in a specfile.