[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 4:37 AM, Mike A. Harris <mharris at mharris.ca> wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> James Antill 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?
>>
>> I thought _THE_ selling point of open source has always been that in
>> case of problems the vendor can't/won't fix, you have the option to make
>> the change yourself.  But if you can't rebuild their packages or even
>> tell how the source relates to the shipped binary, that isn't true and
>> shouldn't be represented as such.
>
> It sucks that the latest sources do not compile on the OS they were
> originally built for, but the fact is that packages get built at a
> certain point in time against what is in the tree at that time.
>
<snip>
Your spending a lot of time defending the status quo, but your not
really answering an honest complaint.  I've spent a lot of time
servicing customers, and when they complain to you, they really don't
care about explanations that don't try to help them with their
immediate problem.  Typically, at the point they start hearing long
explanations of why things are the way they are without movement in
the direction of helping them with their particular problems they just
move on.

I think the salient points are:

   * RedHat distros today don't self host.
   * Some customers desire that the distro could self host.

Maybe the number of customers that desire this are too small to worry
about, versus the cost of meeting their perceived needs.  Maybe,
solving the problem is really hard.   None of that changes the above
two facts; it only places them in a context.

Cheers...james