2025-06-07 –, Quartz
A few years ago we got rid of ldconfig scriptlets. With sysusers support in rpm, in Fedora 42 & 43 we got rid of scriptlets calling getent/useradd/groupadd. Can we get rid of most other scriplets? One of the most pervasive are the scriptlets for systemd unit enablement. Let's discuss options how to make those unnecessary and simplify packaging. What about the rest? It'd be great to remove the calls to update-alternatives and make scriptlets the rare exception, not the norm.
Another source of complexity in packaging is arch-specific dependencies (%ifarch foo, BuildRequires:bar-devel, %endif). We could replace those by rich dependencies, making srpms arch-independent. This would make querying package dependencies much easier, but also help with reproducible builds. What is the best design for this? Some syntactic sugar in rpm would make this easier to implement.
Stephen Gallagher (He/Him) is a long-time member of the Fedora community. He has served on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee since 2011 and has been employed by Red Hat since 2008. He lives and breathes open source.
I work in Red Hat, in the team maintaining systemd. I'm a packager and member of FESCo.