No packaging information on rpm specfile feature %config

[Jeff Johnson]

rpm specfiles allow the files list to contain a directive %config. According to
Maximum RPM:

The %config directive is used to flag the specified file as being a
configuration file. RPM performs additional processing for config files when
packages are erased, and during installations and upgrades. This is due to the
nature of config files: They are often changed by the system administrator, and
those changes should not be lost.

Respondents to LSB disucssions seem to be assuming this feature is available to
LSB packages, but we're not aware of anything in the LSB package format that
flags these files as special for the handling described above. Should the
packaging spec provide guidance on avoiding this feature, the way it says to
avoid package triggers now? The LSB spec doesn't say anything about how a
package is constructed, but people who recognize it as the rpm format are making
assumptions about available features that may or may not be supported, and this
should be described somehow. Always the question is: can a non-RPM
implementation support the feature (e.g. would alien preserve such information)?

(Filed as a reminder because we talked about it - do some more research. We
also talked about the %doc directory, but it seems to be benign, it only
instructs rpm to put files in a pre-designated directory, and doesn't look to
have any impact on the output file format).