Hi,

the MPI guidelines currently state

"If the packager wishes to provide alternatives support, it MUST be placed in a subpackage ..."

However, it has become clear that this statement is not clear enough and warrants an additional specification. The guidelines were written as to be fair to all people independent of the compiler and runtime they are using.

However, some MPI runtimes have been misbehaving by autoloading their environment with a file in /etc/profile.d placed in the runtime package (BZ #647147). This has disunited the user interface and caused many problems for package builders trying to compile a serial version of an MPI-aware code (see for instance BZ #737043).

I am thus proposing that the MPI guidelines be clarified by the additional statement

"MUST: If the maintainer wants to provide autoloading support for the MPI environment, it must be placed in a separately installable subpackage."

(see text in bold italics at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/MPI )