Vanilla builds guideline?

[Kamil Dudka]

Hi Kevin,

On Tuesday 01 November 2011 18:23:25 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> IMHO, that would be unhelpful, unneccessary and unsupportable.

thank you for expressing your concerns.

> You already mention that there are patches which need to be applied for the
> package to build/work at all.

For the vast majority of Fedora packages, we are already able to do vanilla 
builds using the aforementioned utility without changing _anything_ in the 
packages themselves.  The other packages (5-10%) require usually a one-line 
change in the specfile to get this working.

> It's not always obvious which these are. 

Please be specific.  Are there any patches that you are not sure whether
they are required for build?  Then give us some examples.

> Plus, where do you draw the line between working and not working? Moreover,
> in some cases, building against the Fedora libfoo will require a patch,
> whereas building against the vanilla libfoo won't (and the patch might even
> make it not build).

Such a patch needs to be improved anyway in order to be accepted by upstream, 
which is our long-term goal, isn't it?

> I think it's hard enough to make things work as is. People who want vanilla
> upstream software should build it directly from upstream or use Slackware.
> I'll take software that actually works, thank you very much! Every minute
> spent on making vanilla builds work is a minute NOT spent on making our
> default builds work better.

We are not forcing anybody to work on fixing issues related to vanilla builds. 
This request is about defining a standardized way for supporting vanilla 
builds.  It will always be maintainer's decision whether to support them or 
not.  Actually many core packages (such as kernel or openjdk) explicitly 
support vanilla builds for long period already.

Kamil