Developers of Sympa

[David Kewley <address@concealed>]

I am not a member of the list, so please cc: me.

Yesterday I spent several hours taking the latest stable source rpm 
http://www.sympa.org/distribution/binaries/SRPMS/sympa-3.4.4.3-8.src.rpm 
and making it work quite a bit better.  It can now be built sanely as a 
non-root user on Red Hat Linux 9.  At the end of this email is my srpm 
changelog entry, to give you an idea what I did.

There are a number of changes here; there are some patches which should be 
applied to the sympa source, plus the specfile itself is changed a fair 
bit.  What is the best way to report these changes for review and possible 
inclusion?  I see the bug tracking system, but there are a number of things 
I'm reporting here, so I'm not sure the bug tracker is the best place to 
put them.

It'd be easiest for me to pass the source rpm, or the specfile plus the 
three patch files I created, to an rpm-savvy sympa developer for review.  I 
don't intend to become a sympa developer; I simply had an itch to scratch 
as a sysadmin, and want to contribute the results back to the sympa 
project.

David

* Thu Mar 11 2004 David Kewley <address@concealed> 3.4.4.3-8.cs.1
- added USER and GROUP in 'make install' to avoid having to build as root
- added sympa-3.4.4.3-wws_templates-perms.patch to avoid install & cleanup
  problems; patch removes a chown; I don't know why the chown was there in
  the first place
- added sympa-3.4.4.3-no-chown-root.patch to stop make install from
  generating errors when it tries to chown root a couple of suid
  executables; do in %files instead
- added sympa-3.4.4.3-add-UMASK.patch to make template files readable; never
  mind that UMASK is the permissions to set, NOT the umask, sigh
- added Provides: for some of the .pl scripts that are in this package,
  because rpmbuild doesn't realize that we satisfy our own dependency (rpm's
  perl.req doesn't parse "use lib '/path/to/lib/dir'" in order to see if
  those satisfy our "require")
- folded sympa logrotate in with syslog logrotate (since sympa uses syslog)
- cleaned up / standardized /etc/smrsh files/symlinks
- use chkconfig instead of creating/destroying symlinks manually
- don't destroy sympa user/group in %postun -- we may have files around that
  are owned by sympa, and next time sympa is installed, it may not get same
  uid/gid
- don't chown to sympa in install section; do equivalent in %files
- fixed %doc lines
- altered %build section for easier reading (to my taste at least)
- broadened use of directory-name macros
- changed chown to use : instead of . (. may no longer be allowed)
- changed sympa.spec perms to a+r (sheesh)
- took out "Examples" file listing; covered already by "Data" file
- removed the following commented-out lines from the "# Data" %files section
  for clarity
#%dir %{data_s}
#%{data_s}/ca-bundle.crt
#%{data_s}/create_list.conf
#%{data_s}/edit_list.conf
#%{data_s}/mhonarc-ressources
#%{data_s}/list_aliases.tpl
#%dir %{data_s}/create_list_templates
#%{data_s}/create_list_templates/*
#%dir %{data_s}/scenari
#%{data_s}/scenari/*
#%dir %{data_s}/templates
#%{data_s}/templates/*
#%dir %{data_s}/wws_templates
#%{data_s}/wws_templates/*
#%dir %{data_s}/list_task_models
#%{data_s}/list_task_models/*
#%dir %{data_s}/global_task_models
#%{data_s}/global_task_models/*