[CentOS-devel] a public build tool for seven

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/17/2013 05:50 PM, Steven Crothers wrote:
> Why not run a CentOS Koji, or perhaps request access/space to the
> Fedora Koji (unlikely)?
>
> Koji is the "standard" both for Fedora and EPEL, and I once heard it's
> used internally at Red Hat as well, as far as to what extent, I have
>

While on the surface it sounds like a good idea, the fact of the matter 
is that CentOS rebuilds from already built source RPMS.  This is not the 
normal use case for Koji, where sources, patches, and specs are its input.

I say that from the point of view of actually having rebuilt the whole 
of CentOS 5 source RPMS for IA64 (starting point was Scientific Linux 
CERN 5.4 IA64, the last IA64 SLC release, and I stepwise built up 
through 5.9.  I haven't had the time to set up automatic rebuilds or to 
rebuild 5.10 as yet, and it's not a high priority).  Koji is overkill, 
as even those source RPMS that need modifying and/or rebranding aren't 
many.

The plumbing would be nice to automate, but I found that much of what I 
had to do to get stuff to build wasn't easy to automate. Particularly 
going from 5.5 to 5.6 (I seem to remember a pretty significant delay in 
the official CentOS 5.6 release, and I actually found out why that was 
the case when actually rebuilding the packages).  Manually iterating 
mock to build each package in sequence was necessary, and most of the 
time spent was spent waiting for builds to finish.

The single biggest thing to remember is that RHEL is not self-hosting 
and would fail the normal Fedora builds-itself-from-source testing.  
This is a point that really cannot be overemphasized.

I'm glad to see things get started a bit earlier and more publicly than 
with CentOS 6; kudos to the team so far for this.