[CentOS-devel] Building help

Mon Mar 21 18:54:58 UTC 2011
David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com>

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).

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 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.

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.