[CentOS-devel] FYI: centos reproduceability

Tue Apr 28 20:44:59 UTC 2009
James Olin Oden <james.oden at gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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?
>
Yes.

Now along this sortid trail of email messages, there was mention that
some packages no longer build with the current compilers.   Is that
not the case, or was that a mis-statement?

Because, it sounds Fedora at this point is self-hosting by that
description, and if RedHat follows that practice it too will be self
hosting.

...james