Bug 2029877

Summary: rpmbuild strips path and overwrites multiple %doc and %license files
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel>
Component: rpmAssignee: Packaging Maintenance Team <packaging-team-maint>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: swm-qe
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Version: 8.5CC: maxwell, pmatilai
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Last Closed: 2021-12-08 08:28:58 UTC Type: Bug
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Reduced ansible.spec to trigger duplicate README.md or LICENSE.md issue none

Description Nico Kadel-Garcia 2021-12-07 14:15:18 UTC 
Created attachment 1845077 [details]
Reduced ansible.spec to trigger duplicate README.md or LICENSE.md issue

Description of problem:
  If .spec files contains multiple %doc or %license files with identical basenames, only one is published in RPM. Publicaton of files are being automatically path stripped. This is new with RHEL 8 and Fedora, RHEL 7 did not have this issue.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
  rpm-build-4.14.3-19.el8.x86_64

How reproducible:
  Use source tarball with multiple README.md or LICENSE.md files, such as ansible-5.0.1.
  Build RPM from spec file.
  RPM contains only the last README.md in /usr/share/doc/%{name}/README.md

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get .spec file from https://github.com/nkadel/README-ansible-srpm/blob/master/README-ansible.spec
2. Run 'spectool -g README-ansible.spec' to get ansible-5.0.1 tarball
3. Build RPM locally with: rpmbuild --define '_topdir $PWD/rpmbuild' \
	--rebuild src.rpm
'
4. See warning messages about README.md listed twice
5. Check rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/*.rpm for README.md files
   rpm -qlp  rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/*.rpm | grep /README.md

Actual results:
    /usr/share/doc/README-ansible/README.md


Expected results:
   ansible_collections/amazon/aws/README.md
   ansible_collections/ansible/netcommon/README.md
   ansible_collections/ansible/posix/.azure-pipelines/README.md
   ansible_collections/ansible/posix/README.md
   ansible_collections/ansible/utils/README.md
   ansible_collections/ansible/windows/README.md

Additional info:
   This also happens with the rpmbuild on RHEL 7, but is less obvious due to the lack of reports about duplicate files. Few packages have so many README.md files or LICENSE files with the same basename, but the new ansible 5.0.1 tarball has over 300 REAME.md files. The path stripping is unnecessary, and unwelcome for tools that may be composed of multiple bundled source repositories this way.
Comment 1 Panu Matilainen 2021-12-08 08:28:58 UTC 
Contrary to the initial report in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/QYZYBWYFTXVOSXBR7JTFWMHQHGF4LAOZ/ the behavior is the same on RHEL 7 so it's not a regression at all, this is entirely expected behavior.

So this is an RFE, and I don't see us addressing it in RHEL 8. Moving this to upstream https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/1855 but thanks for the report, the use-case is legit and would be good to better support it.
Comment 2 Nico Kadel-Garcia 2021-12-08 09:36:14 UTC 
I've agreed elsewhere that I was mistaken, it's indeed happening on RHEL 7. It's less apparent there because there's not a report to the console about duplicate files. The RPM documentation on %spec or %license do not document the behavior.

I can understand wanting to not alter existing default behavior. I'll urge updating the documentation. while many treat a documented bug as a feature, the converse is that an unreported feature can and should be treated as a bug.

Providing a flag to disable this path stripping, similar to the flag for disabling debuginfo packages, could help resolve this for software suites with multiple README.md files.