I can't think of a case where producing an empty debuginfo package would be useful, but empty debuginfo packages are often signs of something wrong with the build, see eg. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Debuginfo So, how about making it an error in rpm-build/redhat-rpm-config? For example something like this appended to find-debuginfo.sh would do the trick: if [ ! -s $LISTFILE ] ; then echo ERROR: empty debuginfo package created exit 1 fi The error message could be improved, but exactly how depends somewhat on whether/if this is going to be done in redhat-rpm-config or rpm-build.
BTW, just adding that to find-debuginfo.sh as is and doing nothing else isn't the right thing to do - it'll break noarch package builds. Anyway, this idea is/was being discussed on the fedora-packaging list too, and has received some positive feedback thus far.
I dislike it, but I'll act according to what is decided. I very much dislike aborting builds just because of some arbitrary logic like this - there might be a reason one would have an empty debuginfo package, and now we're making it impossible to build those packages. Jon.
There could be a way to allow them, it doesn't have to be made impossible. The way I see it, this RFE is analoguous to having builds fail if there are unpackaged files. That can be overridden by setting a variable too. Anyway, there's no decision yet whether this is found desirable, it has been requested that FESCO discusses it in a near future meeting.