[CentOS] Some relevant information

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 09:56:34 am Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Understood. I'd like to replicate or examine the error. "Building it
> yourself", without that access to your unique build environment or a
> way to gracefully replicate it, represents dozens or hundreds of
> man-hours for each contributor who'd like to help. That's a little
> hard to do right now.

He's given out his build system requirements.  Last I saw it was 'C5.5 fully updated' (which I take to be 'with all the current public updates') .... but, no, you can grep the archives for yourself for the mock version he said.  I read that message; it gave enough information to get started.

And to replicate the error you have to do the work; there is no shortcut, and if you don't have time to put that many hours into it (like me; I don't have that kind of time right now either) then you can't replicate it.  Besides, it's already fixed in the C5 tree, so replication is not really useful at the moment, at least not to CentOS, I would think.

> Ohh. Then I guess all the "requests for help" in the last few months
> were looking for something else?

Yes, they were.  None of the requests for help I saw included 'help us build or re-tool the buildsystem' as part of the request.  Requests were made for help with specific tasks; building or source control for changed specs was not found in any of those requests.  If you're going to help someone, you have to help that someone in the areas that that someone wants help; if you go to the auto mechanic and ask for an oil change it doesn't help for that mechanic to go ahead and do an engine overhaul just because the mechanic would rather help by doing an engine overhaul, even if an oil change *is* a side-effect of an engine overhaul.

> Fine. Then show *US* how you're doing it. Publish the /etc/mock/ files
> you use, 

He has done this.  More than once, now, in the CentOS-devel list.  Go read the archives; it's all there.

> and provide some visibibility to the bootstrapping you're
> allegedly using for CentOS 6, and we'd love to help on this and future
> releases. 

Ok, let's try this again.  The bootstrapping of the buildroots is a process that isn't really finished until the last package is built and tested as binary compatible   If all the packages aren't built, or if all the packages have not passed QA, then the full bootstrap is not known.

Bootstrapping a major version bump for a distribution is a really a one-time event, I would think, and the specifics of that bootstrap likely will not be usable (the general way of going about it will be) as such on the next major version. 

Bootstrapping a from-source rebuild is at the moment, and as far as I know, the least documented of the steps involved, but at the same time information has been posted as to the initial seed for the rebuild, and for the bootstrapping start point.  While I could do the legwork and post the link for you in the archives, I think you should go find it yourself.

> The build components in the "build" repository, for example,
> are pretty old and clearly out of date. Point us to the current
> versions, please!

How do you know that those are not the current versions for building and QAing C4.x and C5.x?  For C6 they're not going to publish until they have proven working versions.  C4 and C5 are old enough.... and build scripts for old base distributions don't need changing for every release if the old version still works, no?

The CentOS developers did not ask for (that I saw, at least) and at this point in time apparently neither want nor need help with the build piece; we have some promises that the process will be better documented for C6, and we'll not see that document until it is known that the process works to a fully-released conclusion.

So hold on to your hat, be patient, and wait on the release.... or go build it yourself for already published documents/e-mails.  It is doable.  Once you do it be sure to publish your results.....