Using rpm for incremental development builds? (was: Dependency loops considered harmful?)

[Matthew Woehlke]

Vasile Gaburici wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Matthew Woehlke
> <mw_triad at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>> Uhm... you realize that building an rpm every time you want to test a
>>> change as you develop an app is incredibly clunky?  It really is not
>>> going to happen.  Really.
>> I still submit that this itself is a problem that should be worked on... Why
>> must it be "too clunky"? Why can't we fix it so that expecting developers to
>> install via rpm, even for incremental builds, is perfectly reasonable? Of
>> course this process probably won't involve going through a full rpmbuild,
>> just something that tracks the installed files in rpm's database along with
>> updating the database for dependencies (i.e. it would replace 'make install'
>> but not 'make all').
> 
> This would be nice, but it is at odds with the idea of building from
> pristine (archived) sources.

Hmm, true, but we're talking about something to make developers' jobs 
easier. And, like I mentioned, I'm thinking mainly along the lines of 
using rpm to track files from home-built software as well as dependency 
tracking.

Also, it would be *really* nice to be able to build qt-copy and have it 
update rpm's database to "know" that I have qt4 already :-). I know, I 
can forge the db entries, but then if I ever try to back out qt-copy I'm 
in a bit of a pickle (because I have to remember to back our the rpm-db 
changes also).

If I could install with rpm, backing out qt-copy would be as easy as 
'rpm -e qt4-4.4.2-copy', which would undo the install, pester me about 
any packages that need qt4^1, and clean up the db in one shot.

...and I wouldn't have to occasionally 'rm -rf $KDEDIR' because rpm 
would be handling removal of stale files for me.

(^1 ...which suggests another feature; if removing an orphaned package, 
i.e. something not in yum's repos^2, yum could ask me if I want to 
install a repo package to satisfy dependencies rather than remove 
dependent packages.)

(^2 ...which I guess would mean using yum instead of rpm, but that 
should be ok.)

-- 
Matthew
This message represents the official view of the voices in my head.
   -- Unknown
(found at http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/fun.html)