[Base] Proposal for buildrequires cleanup janitorial initiative

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 10:57:00AM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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.)

auto-buildrequires (http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/auto-buildrequires/)
uses an LD_PRELOAD hack to find out what BuildRequires are packages
are actually touched during the build.  Therefore it does not suffer
from this problem.

Rich.

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