From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7 Description of problem: There is a BuildRequires: perl in /usr/share/fedora/spectemplate-perl.spec but in the guidelines it is said that perl is in the unneeded BuildRequires. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fedora-rpmdevtools-1.4-1.fc4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. nothing to reproduce 2. 3. Additional info:
It is unneeded as long as rpm-build and/or redhat-rpm-config pulls in perl, that's right. But if it some day suddenly doesn't (which I don't personally find impossible at all), build of packages without the perl dependency would be broken. (Having fedora-rpmdevtools pull in perl doesn't count, the specfiles should continue to work on systems without it installed too.) Unless there are really strong opinions about this, I'm going to leave it in because removing it would be "fixing" something that is not broken.
In the review guidelines, not having BR perl is a must, see: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ReviewGuidelines - MUST: A package must not contain any BuildRequires that are listed in the exceptions section of Packaging Guidelines. I find it very troubling to have something that goes against a MUST packaging item in the fedora spec template. At least a comment should be added? Maybe the topic should be taken on the fedora-extras list? Or is fedora-rpmdevtools not fedora specific?
If you feel strongly about it, go ahead and start discussion on the fedora-extras list. Note that this case is not about fedora-rpmdevtools being Fedora specific or not per se; it's more about whether the spec template and packages based on it are. I'm trying to keep comments to the minimum in the spec templates and won't add one for this. If the consensus is that the BR: perl must go from the spec template, I'll just drop it. Personally I think that the above MUST in the case of perl is a bit silly though, but mileages obviously vary.