Bug 611320

/me wonders how and if Red Hat will "upstream" the changes they have made to their "Fedora fork" back to Fedora. Alternatively why Red Hat haven't upstreamed their changes to the software project (Mercurial in this case).

It will be very inefficient if all Fedora packagers must try and find RHEL source RPMs and pick patches without coordination with the Red Hat packager.

Perhaps Red Hat will publish their patches and push for their inclusion when RHEL6 is released?

My understanding is that upstream is trying to sync their package to ours.

Could you please attach patches?

Hello Neal,

I'll attach the changes later today, shouldn't be a big deal overall.

Mads, Fedora and also RHEL are both pretty fast pace development and
Red Hat does _very_ good wrt Fedora/RHEL exchange, so this is only
a small item to report.

regards,

Florian La Roche

Created attachment 429573 [details]
.spec file changes

Change to the .spec file, all only cosmetic changes.

Created attachment 429574 [details]
env patch

patch to not use env, might make sense if this is the route also
for other Fedora rpms.

/usr/bin/env python is the standard way to invoke python on unix-like systems.  Why should it not be used for RHEL?

It's simple - /usr/bin/env python can cause supportability troubles when someone installs his version of python e.g. somewhere in $HOME and /usr/bin/env determines that this version should be the one used for running programs. In such cases it's impossible to guarantee that the program will run correctly.

Replacing /usr/bin/env python with /usr/bin/python (standard path for RHEL-packaged python for which the program is guaranteed to run) reduces probability situations like this will happen.

Sorry for not posting changes from RHEL to Fedora earlier.

Jan, is that an internal RHEL packaging requirement? AFAIK it is not in Fedoras packaging guideline?

Red Hats internal policies and their consequences in RHEL packaging are really not relevant for Fedora.

It is unfortunate and a waste of time and effort if the guidelines (or packages) diverge, but it would be strange if that didn't happen. I expect and accept that Red Hat will guide Fedora in the direction they want by contributing man-power and expertise. But I guess that that discussion belongs somewhere else ;-)

(FWIW I don't see the point in the env change. People can spoil python programs by putting a different python in path, by replacing /usr/bin/python with something else, by setting LD environment variables and 1000 other ways. This patch doesn't add much value. What was the exact problem on the secret issue 528797?)

Yes, both patches are based on internal RHEL requirements. Only the spec file might be relevant to Fedora, because it takes care of some (mostly cosmetic) issues found by rpmlint.

As for /usr/bin/env, it is just RHEL policy to replace it in every program by its respective alternative, e.g. /usr/bin/python. Bug 528797 just states that it is needed to change /usr/bin/env python to /usr/bin/python in mercurial, there is no additional issue there.

I realize that there are many other ways how to spoil python programs, but for most of them user realizes that he might be breaking something. I guess that this particular scenario is easy to achieve while it remains unclear to some users that they are actually breaking their system.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle.
Changing version to '14'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

It should stay a priority to keep rpm packages between RHEL and fedora in sync.
Has this topic shown up in discussions or Fedora packaging guidelines so far?

It is not a big item overall...

regards,

Florian La Roche

This message is a notice that Fedora 14 is now at end of life. Fedora 
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