Development/Tasks/Packaging/Policies/General Conventions

This is a set of general conventions for all Mandriva packages.

Violation of these conventions is automatically detected by rpmlint.

Currently nost of these conventions are not strict requirements but recommendations, so their violation will not break the build.

However, as times goes by, more of these conventions will become obligatory (see Development/Tasks/Packaging/Policies/Roadmap for more information).

Requirements for RPM Tag Values

All the tags listed in the table below should exist in the package; this is checked by corresponding rpmlint tests.

Tag	Requirements	Rationale
Summary	must fit on one line should begin with a capital letter should not exceed 79 symbols should not begin with whitespace character encoding should be UTF-8	Every package should be described by a short, well formed sentence to help users quickly identify useful programs among tons of existing software
Description	every line should not exceed 79 symbols should end with dot character encoding should be UTF-8	Description tag should contain detailed information about the package but should still fit standard text width

Packages are forbidden to install files in the following directories:

Purpose of these directories is described in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Packages are forbidden to install the following kinds of files: