On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, James Olin Oden wrote:
Cheers...james
P.S. Now I did bring up a premise that may not be true, which was that the issue is not "Technical" but that it was a RedHat "Process" problem. If I'm wrong in that regard, then actually a solution is achievable, and one might work on the problem, and not be a RedHat employee. I do agree that there are technical things one could do to help solve the problem, but its seems to me that the main thing they need is an automated rebuild of the world to detect if there is indeed a problem with the build being self hostable. I would guess RedHat has this capability in their build system, and if they do, it would be a decision to use it or not...which is a process issue.
I'm not going to comment on red hat processes b/c I honestly don't know them and cannot answer for them. I do know a few things about Fedora's processes for completely rebuilding the distro and since some of the future rhel processes come out of the fedora processes I think looking at how a complete rebuild of fedora happens might be the most valuable.
Normally, when fedora is being rebuilt we build on whatever has come before and what's available and we do it all in mock in build dep order.
Now, those deps are better in fedora 7,8,9,10 and rawhide than it was in fedora core 6 (what rhel5 was based off of).
We install a publically published set of base pkgs and that's what the build environment starts with.
then we rebuild the srpm inside the mock chroot from the spec we've made
then we build the package.
The resulting packages are added to the set of repositories that mock can pull from for future builds.
Then the chroot is cleaned and reinstalled and the build begins for the next pkg in the chain.
Does that help?
-sv