Comments and Explanations
MOSTLY EMPTY DRAFT

Use license macro in RPMs for packages in Cloud Image

Summary

Use new %license macro to separate license files from documentation, so the latter can be excluded from container images without stripping license information which must be included.

Owner

Name: Matthew Miller
Email: mattdm at fedoraproject
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 21
Last updated: 2014-04-04
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Background:

1. Right now, license files are required to be marked as %doc files. 2. There has long been a "nodocs" parameter to RPM which skips all doc files. 3. In addition to the desired space-savings, this installs packages without their possibly-mandatory license files

This interaction hasn't been problematic before, because generally using nodocs is an endpoint choice with no distribution after that. But now, we are looking at building some official cloud and container images with nodocs, so it suddenly becomes important.

As a bonus, in the future, %license may handle automatic hardlinking of identical license files.

Specifically, I propose:

1. We change the guidelines 2. We start doing it for new packages 3. We file a F21 system-wide change (that is, this change) for a proven packager to change all the packages that land in the cloud image for F21 (roughly, @core + dependencies plus a few extras) 4. For next release, we file a system-wide change for F22 to update all other packages which are part of the base design 5. Other packages updated on a as-time-permits/best-effort basis

Benefit to Fedora

Scope

Proposal owners:

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)