Is it necessary to touch a %ghost?

[hroncok]

A very very old documentation says:

There are times when a file should be owned by the package but not installed - log files and state files are good examples of cases you might desire this to happen.

The way to achieve this, is to use the %ghost directive. By adding this directive to the line containing a file, RPM will know about the ghosted file, but will not add it to the package. However it still needs to be in the buildroot. Here's an example of %ghost in action.

%install
touch $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_localstatedir}/log/blather.log
…
%files
…
%ghost %{_localstatedir}/log/blather.log

http://ftp.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-inside-files-list-directives.html#S3-RPM-INSIDE-FLIST-GHOST-DIRECTIVE

The current docs say no such thing:

https://rpm-software-management.github.io/rpm/manual/spec.html#ghost

It is possible to build a package with %ghost %{_localstatedir}/log/blather.log without first touching the path (at least with RPM 4.20), but rpmlint 2.5.0 says:

joft.noarch: E: non-readable /var/log/blather.log 0

That brings me to this question:

• Is it necessary to create (e.g. touch) %ghost files in the buildroot, or was this only true in the past?
• If it is necessary, should RPM fail to build the package when the %ghost is not in the buildroot?
• If it is not necessary, is this a bug in rpmlint?

[pmatilai]

It's a bug in rpmlint.

Rpm hasn't required %ghost files to exist in the buildroot since 2009 (07524b6) and since 2012 has supported %ghost directories in similar manner too (07524b6)

[hroncok]

Reported rpm-software-management/rpmlint#1287

[ffesti]

You still might want to create the ghost file - e.g. if you want to reserve the space during installation. The meta data is taken from the file if it exists.