distro release and reproduceability
hi,
i started a thread on centos-devel:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2009-April/004398.html
but actually it's nothing to do with centos rather rhel and fedora.
the question comes when i try to rebuild centos on itself. it turns out
not possible what's more it's almost impossible to rebuild (or takes
much more longer then the build time).
the problem is the process how each packages and updates added to the
distro ie. just the new packages rebuild and doesn't care whether the
old packages still build. and easy example the latest mass rebuild.
there were some problems with since new gcc can't compile old 'buggy'
code, but there are many problems which has nothing to do with gcc, rpm
or i586.
the first question:
- is it a goal for fedora to be able to rebuild itself?
i hope the answer is yes:-)
- how we can achieve this goal?
imho the current policy and process is not good enough.
first of all it'd be useful to somehow automatically check all spec file
during builds (eg. don't put check into %build, don't put build into
%install or %prep etc).
the most important when a new or updated package build and added, then
- at leat rebuild every package which depend on or requires the new
package if all builds succeed add the new packages otherwise don't allow
until other compilation fails.
- but would be better same as 1. but also include all new rebuild in the
updates which are different from it's last build (here some smart diff
would be required eg. binary must be the same (what if newer gcc
generate different/better code?) some other files can differ eg.
generated docs can have some 'small' differences. this second step is a
more complicated and requires a few more tools but would be better.
of course all of his requires a bit more build farm resource but produce
a much better and stable distro.
--
Levente "Si vis pacem para bellum!"