On Tue, 22 Mar 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
Building the kernel shouldn't be an issue - but look at the SL notes on the srpms that don't build with the listed dependencies as shipped - and they aren't being picky about the library linkages matching the RH binaries like CentOS is.
If the RH build links things from source they don't ship, how much can you trust the projects that depend on that source to be able to ship timely updates?
Sometimes looking at the list and the posts, I feel like I am watching a group of nuns, talking (speculating) about the life issues of Las Vegas showgirls
In trial building the upstream's '6' sources, about the only circular build dependency that comes to mind was an openMPI / valgrind '-devel' pair that was cross dependent and needed for later packages. It was easy enough to 'bootstrap' around, as the dependencies were not 'versioned' such that a prior valgrind worked just fine to break the circularity
The compulsive obsession on matching every library version exactly is usually just not an issue to most users of any distribution, so long as they do not have a third-party (and non-LSB conformant) application that absolutely positively needs a given library for some reason. Some of the very high end accellerated graphics drivers oriented for some NVidia chipsets in certain blade configurations fall over and die back to non-accelerated, because the driver vendor is calling some non-exposed library interface; some simulation software return slightly varying results out several bits of precision. Other than that, the Unix that we live in is very forgiving with a quick recompile thanks to the FSF / GNU work on the autotools
PLUG: if the darn applications were written to a given LSB level, these issues would go away. But frankly for what one pays for some of these applications, adding a license from upstream is lost in the 'rounding error' of the price /PLUG
I am not against such efforts to match at the library version level [it is articulated as part of what CentOS does], but it is usually not the end of the world when a person has to port around some minor deviation in the build environment
'Mother superior 'Les, later ...
they do rely on the upstream which previously was not openly hostile to rebuilds
It was not always so ... in the early days, there was pushback against the rebuild efforts in general; there is pushback toward commercial 'free-riders' now. This comes and goes, and really there is no substitute for actually 'doing' rather than talking in the cloister
It is not the end of the world when one hits a build problem, as the sources, at the end of the day, are provided, and one can study and read. Indeed, as the collection of Linux variants (and thus soliutons of others to study) out there has grown, it is much easier these days to solve such issues [I solved a cfengine-3.1.4 yesterday with minimal effort]
-- Russ herrold