[CentOS-devel] a public build tool for seven

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/22/2013 02:11 AM, Steven Crothers wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
>> 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 don't believe that is true, releasing Red Hat built binaries would
> be directly against the Red Hat licensing agreement.

Binaries?  Where did I mention binary RPMS?  Source RPMS == SRPMS, 
right?  The source RPM (SRPM) is spit out from the same build process 
that makes the binary RPM (thus, why I called them 'already built').  
The input to building RPMS is in SOURCES and SPECS in the build tree; 
SRPMS are not the input, they are part of the output of the process and 
encapsulate the input to the process in a convenient and rebuildable  
wrapper that also holds some essential build information that is not 
found in the normal SOURCES and SPECS input.

>
> C6 is/should be built from SRPMs, Johnny builds each package in his environment.

The environment used is the one built up by mock in the buildroot; 
sometimes some customizations have to be added to make this work 
(hand-injecting buildrequires, as Johnny mentioned, is part of the 
process; there are ways to automate 'hand' injection without modifying 
the source RPM (SRPM, if you prefer)).  I've done this myself, 
rebuilding CentOS 5 on IA64, and it was educational.

Koji is built to best handle the case for building from SOURCES and 
SPECS (which are in a revision control system, ideally), not from 
already built source RPMS (SRPMS).  It will rebuild from SRPM, but it's 
overkill for that use case.

Again, I say that from first-hand experience in actually doing a 
rebuild, this isn't speculation on my part here.  Go back and read the 
archives; I was one who, until actually trying it, thought koji might be 
a good thing (it's in the archives, as I already said).  I had to have 
it proven to me, and I proved it to myself that koji is overkill for 
this purpose.