[Base] Proposal for buildrequires cleanup janitorial initiative

[Vít Ondruch]

Dne 13.12.2013 14:41, Phil Knirsch napsal(a):
> On 12/13/2013 12:20 PM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
>> Dne 12.12.2013 18:50, Phil Knirsch napsal(a):
>>>
>>> Initiate build requires cleanup for base related packages in Fedora
>>> working with maintainers and the community. The goal is to reduce the
>>> number of self-hosting packages required for Base from currently over
>>> 2000 packages.
>>
>> Just a few (probably silly ;) ideas which comes to my mind reading about
>> this initiative:
>>
>> * 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.
>
> Good point. For some of the BRs i've already noticed i was wondering 
> whether they are really necessary anymore. But ye, that would have to 
> be at least somewhat automated as doing that manually for single 
> packages would be a gigantic task time wise.
>
> /me makes a note.
>
>> * Second level could be to try to limit the BR, although some extended
>> functionality or binding might not be supported. This extended
>> functionality or bindings could be moved out into separate package,
>> although it would require second build run. Looking into Python BR, I
>> believe they could be trimmed down using this approach.
>
> Yea, I suspect both could be combined though in a script that 
> gradually adds new BRs to a package and then iterates over adding and 
> removing BRs until it produces equivalent output (not identical as 
> thats kinda hard to verify and achieve, but same provides/requires of 
> resulting packages and same filelist at least).
>

Achieve the same output is more for the first point. But the second 
point is more to have minimal requirements for build. Later, one have to 
manually review what is essential feature of the package and what can be 
moved into subpackage.

E.g. continuing with my Python example, lets assume that Python is 
buildable with or without OpenSSL support. Python without enabled 
OpenSSL would be probably pain, because missing crypto functionality, 
etc. Other thing is Tcl/Tk support. I believe that Tcl/Tk could be moved 
into independent package and build independently, while all the features 
would be available in the end.

Vít