[CentOS] Some relevant information

Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel at gmail.com
Wed Mar 23 17:24:44 UTC 2011


On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 09:56:34 am Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> Understood. I'd like to replicate or examine the error. "Building it
>> yourself", without that access to your unique build environment or a
>> way to gracefully replicate it, represents dozens or hundreds of
>> man-hours for each contributor who'd like to help. That's a little
>> hard to do right now.
>
> He's given out his build system requirements.  Last I saw it was 'C5.5 fully updated' (which I take to be 'with all the current public updates') .... but, no, you can grep the archives for yourself for the mock version he said.  I read that message; it gave enough information to get started.

mock version is not the same as mock files. Really. The mixing of
older, CentOS 5.5 versus updated components can get tricky, and the
tweaks to enable the use of unsigned locally managed components
requires thought (or should!!). There are also components in the RHEL
5.6 SRPM's that have mutual dependencies and have to be built
together. I don't care to spend all that time rebuilding all that work
if I don't have to.

> And to replicate the error you have to do the work; there is no shortcut, and if you don't have time to put that many hours into it (like me; I don't have that kind of time right now either) then you can't replicate it.  Besides, it's already fixed in the C5 tree, so replication is not really useful at the moment, at least not to CentOS, I would think.


>> Fine. Then show *US* how you're doing it. Publish the /etc/mock/ files
>> you use,
>
> He has done this.  More than once, now, in the CentOS-devel list.  Go read the archives; it's all there.

>> and provide some visibibility to the bootstrapping you're
>> allegedly using for CentOS 6, and we'd love to help on this and future
>> releases.
>
> Ok, let's try this again.  The bootstrapping of the buildroots is a process that isn't really finished until the last package is built and tested as binary compatible   If all the packages aren't built, or if all the packages have not passed QA, then the full bootstrap is not known.

*Current status* would be helpful.

> Bootstrapping a major version bump for a distribution is a really a one-time event, I would think, and the specifics of that bootstrap likely will not be usable (the general way of going about it will be) as such on the next major version.
>
> Bootstrapping a from-source rebuild is at the moment, and as far as I know, the least documented of the steps involved, but at the same time information has been posted as to the initial seed for the rebuild, and for the bootstrapping start point.  While I could do the legwork and post the link for you in the archives, I think you should go find it yourself.

"And then a miracle occurred". Yes.

>> The build components in the "build" repository, for example,
>> are pretty old and clearly out of date. Point us to the current
>> versions, please!
>
> How do you know that those are not the current versions for building and QAing C4.x and C5.x?  For C6 they're not going to publish until they have proven working versions.  C4 and C5 are old enough.... and build scripts for old base distributions don't need changing for every release if the old version still works, no?

Becuse I read them. Many, not all are centos-3 specific. Others are
behavioral replicas, with no indication which is actually in use.

That's the sort of thinig source control is so useful for. Getting not
just your source, but your build chain under into the source
management helps assure the overall quality and consistency of what
you do, and be able to replicate your build environment.

I've looked at the previous requests for help. I stink at graphics,
unfortunately, but have considerable difficulty replicating the other
issues because the build environment is undocumented.

> The CentOS developers did not ask for (that I saw, at least) and at this point in time apparently neither want nor need help with the build piece; we have some promises that the process will be better documented for C6, and we'll not see that document until it is known that the process works to a fully-released conclusion.

So, you're saying they don't want help, only help with what they want
help with, thank you very much?

> So hold on to your hat, be patient, and wait on the release.... or go build it yourself for already published documents/e-mails.  It is doable.  Once you do it be sure to publish your results.....

Or hop to Scientificic Linux, where the resulting delays are not so large.



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