[Base] Proposal for buildrequires cleanup janitorial initiative

[Phil Knirsch]

On 12/14/2013 02:25 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-12-13 at 14:45 +0100, Phil Knirsch wrote:
>
>> 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. :)
>
> That's still not really enough; that metadata doesn't express anything
> *close* to all the possible capabilities of a package. Not saying this
> isn't a good idea, just that it should involve careful manual double
> checking of compose logs and the like.
>
> We already have AutoQA running rpmdiff and rpmguard tests on new builds,
> btw. I doubt it would be difficult to hook this effort up to that AutoQA
> stuff somehow so you can get nice rpmdiff/rpmguard results between your
> test builds. tflink/kparal (CCed) may have some thoughts.
>

I'll definitely give those a try, thanks for the suggestions and ideas.

And yes, i agree that simply because the builds "appear" to be the same 
doesn't mean they actually are.

But having a list of BRs that could potentially be removed is obviously 
the first important step which has to be followed by a proper 
verification that the actual new build without the BRs really does work 
the same way as the old one and doesn't have any features removed 
invisibly or some documentation instead of being regenerated just copied 
or anything like that.

Regards, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  +49-711-96437-470
Manager Core Services        | Fax.:  +49-711-96437-111
Red Hat GmbH                 | Email: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch at redhat.com>
Wankelstrasse 5              | Web:   http://www.redhat.com/
D-70563 Stuttgart, Germany