Hello Fedora Devs,

I'm currently going through the pre-review process for adding Ingres to the Fedora distribution (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=578024). I'm getting some conflicting information for a couple of issues and I was hoping for some clarification.

Firstly, "%defattr()". The standard says it should be "%defattr(-.root,root-)" unless there is a good reason for it not to be. The vast majority of the files included in the Ingres packages are owned by the user 'ingres', which seems (IMHO) to be a good reason to use "%defattr(-,ingres,ingres,-)".  One reviewer disagreed, one agreed this was probably OK but that I should check. What's the consensus here?

Next, use of -f in the %files section. There are over 1700 files between the 4 RPMs and the ownership and permission for each file is maintained by one of the build tools. The file lists are generated as part of the build process, not stored statically in the source. In order to add the file lists to the SPEC files, I would need to do full build of the exact same source outside of RPM, generate the files list, add them to SPEC file and then run the RPM build. This is a fairly large over head for each update and makes maintenance a much larger task and much more susceptible to human error. By using the -f flag, I can generate the lists at build time using the existing manifest and they will always be correct. %files -f is also used by PostgreSQL so it's not completely outlawed. Am I OK to use it?

Thanks in advance for your help.

J

Jay Hankinson
Emerging Technologies Team
Ingres Corp