It's quite common that other packages own same directory, there's no problem for it. Which means you will end up with different packages installed on system...
For example, gallery3 co-owns /etc/httpd/conf.d which makes perl-HTML-Mason to pull it instead of httpd-filesystem.
perl-HTML-Mason has Req: %{_sysconfdir}/httpd/conf.d
Requires by files are completely safe, but by directories they can cause some weird behavior. For example, there are tons of pkgs which own /usr/lib64/girepository-1.0, but if you want really to get real owner for this directory, you should use gobject-introspection%{?_isa} instead of direct directory requirement since it will pull any random package which owns this dir.
Unfortunately I don't have time for writing guidelines for this... But it should be quite easy, 1 paragraph somewhere.
I disagree with this. After all, multiple packages can Provides: foo and we aren't going to ban, well, all dependencies.
Any guideline here would have to be more nuanced than "ban all dependencies on directories".
We discussed this at this weeks meeting (http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2017-02-09/fpc.2017-02-09-17.01.txt):
Metadata Update from @james: - Issue assigned to tibbs
Metadata Update from @tibbs: - Issue close_status updated to: None - Issue tagged with: meeting
Note that given what we're doing in #632 I'm not sure there's anything left to do here. Basically we've tightened up the language to point out that requiring a directory is only guaranteed to give you a directory, not any specific package or files within that directory.
We discussed this at this weeks meeting (http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2017-03-02/fpc.2017-03-02-17.00.txt):
Metadata Update from @james: - Issue untagged with: meeting - Issue tagged with: hasdraft, writeup
Metadata Update from @james: - Issue untagged with: hasdraft, writeup - Issue tagged with: needinfo
At this point I'm just going to close this. I don't see going further than what's already in #632, which ended up being pretty close to a prohibition anyway.
Metadata Update from @tibbs: - Issue close_status updated to: nothingtodo - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
Metadata Update from @tibbs: - Issue untagged with: needinfo
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