On Tue, 2019-11-05 at 14:57 -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
Yeah, the reason OpenPKG was able to do this is because their flavor
of RPM had specific enhancements for it:
* Macros used in the spec had their definitions embedded into the
SRPM
* Generated package names and provides were discoverable from the
spec and SRPMs
* The dependency resolver could "install" source packages, build
them,
install the artifacts, and keep going
I want to clarify that I'm not proposing that we become a non-binary
distro. I think we can adapt the ideas that Gentoo and others* have
employed while still shipping binary RPMs.
That said, as a user of a source based distro, the idea of being able
to take Fedora SRPMs and build a custom local build out of it is a neat
idea, thanks for sharing. The thread a bit ago about using newer
processor instructions is an example of a use case that someone might
benefit from something like this. If you have a brand new processor and
want to take advantage of the new instructions it can do, build your
own SRPMs!
* I talk about Gentoo a lot because I've been a user of that distro for
a long time and have a lot of familiarity with it. I don't do so to
the exclusion of how other distros have solved these problems, so
please note that I equally welcome learning from Nix, Debian, or
anyone else.