[Base] Proposal for buildrequires cleanup janitorial initiative

[Phil Knirsch]

On 12/13/2013 02:31 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 12:20:50 +0100,
>    Vít Ondruch <vondruch at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> * It might be interesting to have some script, which tries to audit
>> BR, e.g. it removes all BR first and then adds them back as they are
>> required. This could reveal some BR which are actually not needed
>> anymore, but are listed among BR from historic reasons.
>
> The check for this needs to be careful. When some requirements are
> missing a build can still succeed, but be missing intended features. So
> you can't just test whether a build succeeds or fails to determine if a
> build requirement is really needed.

Yep. I remember back when we did the s390x stuff for F12 that was one of 
the things we looked at specifically: Hacking things together to get at 
least building was a good start, but if you didn't install several other 
packages the build would still succeed but with autoconf automatically 
disabling several features.

Thats why i really like the way we've moved over the past 10 years or so 
to explicitly only have a pretty small buildsys environment and almost 
everything else needs to be explicitly required for building from the 
respective packages.

Famous last words: Can't be that hard to write a script that compares 2 
builds that they provide the have the same provides and requires and 
filelists. :)

Thanks & regards, Phil

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Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
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