[CentOS] The delays on CentOS 5.6 are causing EPEL incompatibilities

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/25/11 6:31 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>
>>>> One has to be cautious about the bootstrap environment, to make sure
>>>> that the libraries available in your "mock" or other build
>>>> environments are the same libraries. Red Hat seems to be very, very
>>>> good about this.
>>>
>>> It is not that they are good, they are the authority.  Whatever library
>>> version happened to be in their build root when the linkage was done is
>>> correct by definition even if it isn't what you get when you build that
>>> library from source and/or it isn't specified as a dependency.
>>
>> And they're very good about making sure that they've correctly
>> "bootstrapped" their systems, that their "build" environment matches
>> the components of the available, rebuilt packages.
>
> If that were true, you should be able to duplicate their linkages exactly by
> priming the 1st build run with (all of) their binaries, then rebuilding with
> your own output results instead.  But then everything would be done by now.
>  So I don't think that's true.

I'm speaking up for our CentOS repackagers here. That kind of
bootstrapping takes cycles and practice, and double checking. In
theory, they could. Our CentOS rebuilders have exposed a few
dependencies for which the SRPM's are not published (and which our
favorite upstream vendor is fixing them, but they *don't have to!!!*.
That's not part of a GPL license, it's just good free software
practice.) And they do have to spend time re-arranging centos-release
to publish yum repositories. [  RHEL does it differently, with that
"up2date in grandma's clothing" known as yum-rhn-plugin. I vastly
prefer the genuine yum repository approach used by CentOS. ] And they
legally need to refactor, oh, what? A couple of dozen of packages to
handle trademarks and upstream references?

It's not easy work. I'd love to help, but keep not seeing little
components like the mock configurations.