[CentOS-devel] ... upstream sources v 6 rebuild summary

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 24 Dec 2010, Josh Boyer wrote:

>> enough cpu cycle:-) then no package can be missing from the release.
>
> There is nothing that says all BuildRequires packages have 
> to be shipped in the release.  It's only important to them 
> that they can build RHEL, not anyone else.

True enough -- closed and complete 'self-hosting' has never 
been a goal upstream in their enterprise product; I understand 
the wish of those here (and even more strongly in EPEL which 
this piece was crossposted to as well ...) to have it, however

include my stock IAAL disclaimer, and also not sent from a 
centos email address

For those components of the upstream RHEL sources that are 
GPLv2 licensed (not all of them, by a growing margin) and to 
the people to whom binary content is distributed, this is 
possibly not the case

GPLv2, section 3
 	a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding
 	machine-readable source code

 	[later un-numbered para portion] ... For an executable
 	work, complete source code means all the source code for all
 	modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition
 	files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and
 	installation of the executable

Assuming, arguendo that there are 'tweaks' from Release 
Engineering, or such to make mock stand up and dance, on the 
offending 'make check' absence of PTY [Clark William's comment 
on one], or such [or a need to manually 'walk a build through' 
outside of mock -- I make no such representation, and my 
approach on distribution buildsystems is not CentOS' present 
one], ...

... the build system deviations from what is stock 'mock' 
would appear to constitute either part of the 'complete source 
code' to attain a binary, or alternatively part of 'the 
scripts used to control compilation' ...

and be part of the releasables in proper and a somewhat 
narrow set of cases

* shrug *

and GPLv3 does not have such an argument chain available in it 
that I can see presently

The bugs referenced in this thread here and on the EPEL 
mailing list, seem to refer to Artistic licensed code, however

As to builders, I looked, and upstream released its v 6 
product beta in late July, and the gold release drop in early 
November.  This new major release, with the changes I've noted 
before on one of the mailing lists on the difficulty of doing 
a yum migration from 5 to 6 should be taken to confirm that 
it is indeed challenging to solve it all

I've privately solved subsets of the upstream's 6 sources, not 
for CentOS but for other purposes, and it can be tricky ;)  I 
guess it is time to write my annual buildsystems piece.  If 
bugs in this regard are filed in the CentOS tracker, or in the 
upstream tracker on such problems, and you do no see me 'cc 
into them, please feel free to send a private email to me at
 	herrold owlriver com
and I'll look in on them

-- Russ herrold