[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

[James Antill]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 23:55 +0200, Farkas Levente wrote:

> just ot mention a few problem with 5.3:
> - openjava was added to the distro so all packages which requires
> java-devel now try to build with openjava in stead of gcc's java and
> most of them fail.
> - new updates like dbus-glib, ifd-gate, pccs etc have incompatible devel
> packages eg. headers, but not all of the packages requires these new
> packages was rebuild/fixed so those packages no longer build.
> - newer gcc, toolchain etc (which included in later updates) have
> stronger check and standard compliance but with these tools old and
> buggy code no longer compile.

 This is useless churn to rebuild all the packages to fix these kinds of
build differences, why do you think RH's customers would want them to do
that?

> - rpm and yum (and its' tools) far from perfect... suppose i don't use
> mock. how can i install all required package to buld X.src.rpm?
> apt-get build-dep is many years old, but with rpm?

 I'm not sure what you are trying to ask/say here. Maybe you want to
know about yum-builddep in yum-utils? Why would you not want to use
mock?
 Obviously rpm doesn't contain anything to do this, just as dpkg
doesn't. Also AFAIK apt still kind of works in RHEL-5, although I still
wouldn't recommend it.

> - rpmlint is almost unusable (it's warning about space and tabs:-), but
> no one really checks rhel's and fedora's spec file. eg. see mysql (a not
> so important package:-) it's build check is not in the %check section
> but in the %build. it's a serious bug? not we can put everything in the
> %prep and it's still working, but currently you can't rebuild mysql even
> on it's original rhel 5.2:-(

 This is something that's done at the Fedora level, for obvious (I'd
assume) reasons, you don't want to be changing specfiles just to comply
with rpmlint in something like RHEL.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora