[CentOS-devel] Building help

[Jason Pyeron]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-devel-bounces at centos.org 
> [mailto:centos-devel-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of David Hollis
> Sent: Monday, March 21, 2011 14:55
> To: centos-devel at centos.org
> Subject: Re: [CentOS-devel] Building help
> 
> On 03/21/2011 08:07 AM, Jason Pyeron wrote:
> > I think I was misunderstood. Our concern is to have the latest from 
> > the upstream vendor available as soon as possible.
> > We run about 30-40 centos systems and about the same in RHEL, it is 
> > difficult when there are differences. Since we are not 
> distributing, 
> > we often recompile (without modification) SRPMs and add 
> them to our local yum repo as a stop gap.
> > 
> > Other times were are implementing a bugfix, or feature for a given 
> > customer, we know are way around the few packages we deal 
> with every day.
> > 
> > I think it would be nice, if our efforts were in sync with 
> this group 
> > and benefited everyone.
> 
> I'm completely unaffiliated w/ CentOS development but I think 
> that while your offer of assistance is greatly appreciated, 
> it's likely somewhat outside of what the issues that the 
> CentOS team actually faces.
> Rebuilding an SRPM is really a non-issue, and I doubt that 
> it's even CPU cycles that is a major factor with getting out 
> an update - especially when it's just updates vs. a entirely 
> new version of the OS.
> 
> The issue/challenge/difficulty is with rebuilding the SRPM, 
> ensuring the binary compatibility w/ upstream (were there 
> missing build-reqs that now made the CentOS version not 
> include some files or have library/binary differences), 
> trademark issues, other quirks such as abrt wanting to send 
> traces to RH's bugzilla).

This is something I am very familiar with. I have many time worked with redhat
to fix their build requires sections which have not included needed items
producing faulty rebuilds.

> 
> For a simple package where rpmbuild --rebuild pkg.src.rpm is 
> sufficient, there's really nothing to the process.
> 
> I suspect that while the CentOS team could release some of 
> the updates to 5.5 and/or 5.6 even though the full 5.6 
> release hasn't occurred yet, these updates are held back in 
> the event that an issue is discovered that requires a rebuild 
> of a package that was thought to be correct and already 

It would be useful create an inprogress repo of those that made it past the
trademark review.

> released.  There really is no provision for 'errata' to 
> packages since if upstream releases pkg-1.0-2, CentOS can't 
> push out pkg-1.0-3 since that now creates differences between 
> upstream.
> 

When it is ready for publishing build it twice:

Release x.y and x.y.0.centosnotbincompat.take.42

Where the centosnotbincompat is excluded from the default repo.

> That being said, they have put out the bind97 and php53 
> packages, but only in the c5-testing repo allowing for users 
> that should understand what they are undertaking to 
> test/utilize them without affecting the general userbase.
> 
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> 




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