On Wednesday, March 30, 2011 06:26:40 pm Scott Silva wrote:
I wouldn't be surprised if RedHat was seeding the src rpms with more bad links and flaws just to make it more difficult for Oracle and others to profit as easily from their work... We might just be the unfortunate collateral damage... The GPL says they have to release source, not ready to build rpms.
Naw, I don't think so. Otherwise they wouldn't fix the bug reports of those missing buildreqs. And while those aren't high-priority to fix, they do get fixed. And it's too easy to just modify the spec file in the source RPM and make them build; a very low hurdle, in other words. The kernel source package's pre-patched source code tarball is a much larger hurdle, not for just rebuilding the package, but for modifying and properly (commercially) supporting those packages.
It's likely a simple case of developers missing the dependencies and not quickly fixing them; and, well, they're in the repository for their buildroots, so it doesn't impact them rebuilding out of their private koji. Buildreqs have always been low priority 'bugs' even before the end of the Red Hat Linux Boxed Sets.