On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 12:20:50PM +0100, Vít Ondruch 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.
This is kind of hard to do without extensive functional tests, because it
may be that a BR was added because the build completes happily without it
but misses the related functionality. (This is pretty common, I think.)
* 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.
That's an interesting idea. That'd take some big changes to the build
process and at least to the packaging guidelines if not RPM itself. If
making the base self-hosting is decided to be crucial, it might be worth the
effort. (As opposed to the alternative approach of having a set of "Not in
Base But Needed to Build It" packages.)
--
Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project Architect -- <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>