[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

[Mike A. Harris]

James Olin Oden wrote:

> Your spending a lot of time defending the status quo, but your not
> really answering an honest complaint.  I've spent a lot of time
> servicing customers, and when they complain to you, they really don't
> care about explanations that don't try to help them with their
> immediate problem.  Typically, at the point they start hearing long
> explanations of why things are the way they are without movement in
> the direction of helping them with their particular problems they just
> move on.
> 
> I think the salient points are:
> 
>    * RedHat distros today don't self host.
>    * Some customers desire that the distro could self host.
> 
> Maybe the number of customers that desire this are too small to worry
> about, versus the cost of meeting their perceived needs.  Maybe,
> solving the problem is really hard.   None of that changes the above
> two facts; it only places them in a context.

Depends on the precise definition one uses for "self host" I suppose. 
The only way to truly know that the entire set of current rpm packages 
compiles against itself, is for the entire OS to be rebuilt every time a 
single package changes, and if anything fails, then those packages have 
to be updated as well.

I think it is very unreasonable to expect a large number of packages to 
be released as an update simply so that everything still compiles. 
There are already enough updates coming through the pipe as it is.  To 
churn additional packages just for the moniker "self hosting" might be 
an amiable label to have, I don't really think it is practical.

Having said that, what solution do you propose to this problem?