[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

Tue Apr 28 16:53:37 UTC 2009
James Olin Oden <james.oden at gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:56 AM, James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 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?
One man's uselessness is another man's requirement.  Also, when making
blanket statements about customers, realize that he too is customer,
and he clearly has a different needs.  He is not alone, either.
RedHat being able to self host itself is very important to the class
of customer that is customizing RedHat distributions.  If it can't
self host itself, the process of building all of RedHat being
documented would be an acceptable alternative.  As an aside, if they
didn't use these new fangled compilers, which ones did they use?
That is followed by if they didn't use the new compilers to build
RedHat, then why should we as customers trust these compilers for our
products?

Also, consider that many of us use open source so we can quickly and
effectively support our customers.   That benefit is derived solely
from the access to the source code, and our ability to patch and
rebuild programs from these sources.  If the ability to rebuild from
sources is not there or undocumented, then naturally, we start looking
at other alternatives.

Cheers...james