[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

Tue Apr 28 20:38:22 UTC 2009
Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org>


On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, James Olin Oden wrote:

> Cheers...james
>
> P.S. Now I did bring up a premise that may not be true, which was that
> the issue is not "Technical" but that it was a RedHat "Process"
> problem.  If I'm wrong in that regard, then actually a solution is
> achievable, and one might work on the problem, and not be a RedHat
> employee.  I do agree that there are technical things one could do to
> help solve the problem, but its seems to me that the main thing they
> need is an automated rebuild of the world to detect if there is indeed
> a problem with the build being self hostable.   I would guess RedHat
> has this capability in their build system, and if they do, it would be
> a decision to use it or not...which is a process issue.


I'm not going to comment on red hat processes b/c I honestly don't know 
them and cannot answer for them. I do know a few things about 
Fedora's processes for completely rebuilding the distro and since some of 
the future rhel processes come out of the fedora processes I think looking 
at how a complete rebuild of fedora happens might be the most valuable.

Normally, when fedora is being rebuilt we build on whatever has come 
before and what's available and we do it all in mock in build dep order.

Now, those deps are better in fedora 7,8,9,10 and rawhide than it was in 
fedora core 6 (what rhel5 was based off of).

We install a publically published set of base pkgs and that's what the 
build environment starts with.

then we rebuild the srpm  inside the mock chroot from the spec we've made

then we build the package.

The resulting packages are added to the set of repositories that mock can 
pull from for future builds.

Then the chroot is cleaned and reinstalled and the build begins for the 
next pkg in the chain.

Does that help?

-sv