%readme and %artifact

[Panu Matilainen]

On 9/14/20 3:15 PM, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
> I just bumped to
>    %readme
>    %artifact
> It is briefly mentioned in --verify man page. But I cannot find what is the purpose. Anyone knows?

%readme is an old practically unused and useless thing from previous 
millenium where somebody came up with this neat idea that tagging 
different types of contents is a neat trick. Or something :)

%artifact in contrast is a very recent addition, the main use-case is 
'rpm -ql --noartifact' to weed out packaging side-effects which are not 
interesting to the average user. It's currently only used for debuginfo 
links but for example byte-compiled Python files would classify.

> Additionally, when I try to use %readme it accepts only full path and
> cannot be mixed with %doc (which does not need full path).

%doc exists in two forms, "normal" which takes a full path and "special" 
(which is far more used of the two) which takes a path relative to the 
build directory and copies to a magic place in the buildroot. The 
special form indeed does not mix with anything, the normal form should 
though.

It probably wouldn't be hard to add a special form to %readme too, now 
that the hard work of detaching the "special" from the "doc" has been 
done to support the "special" form of %license. The question probably 
is, who's going to use it/care if we do? I doubt it's worth the trouble...

	- Panu -