[Fedora-packaging] Interesting blog on simplifying packaging for OS bootstrapping

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

So I stumbled upon this blog post:

http://developerblog.redhat.com/2014/12/19/bootstrapping-power8-little-endian-and-common-pitfalls/

and there are a few things in there which seem like they might be good
to incorporate into our packaging guidelines, or perhaps into our
tooling (rpm up through mock and koji).  Random thoughts follow.

Dependency minimization is obviously a big one; we struggle with this.
Build-time dependency minimization is far more difficult.  Is there any
value in standardizing methods (probably using conditionals in the spec)
to minimize build-time dependencies?  If you have a very core package
that needs the whole X stack to build one of its subpackages, maybe
conditionalize the build so that you can build without that subpackage
and not need X.  (autoconf needs emacs?  Wow.)

I think currently we have only one or two places where we absolutely
require lua for scriptlets.  bash is the only one I can think of,
because it would otherwise need itself to install.  Is there value in
using it more often, for more core packages?

I wonder how many packages have additional build-time dependencies
solely for running %check.  Would it be reasonable to be able to
separate these somehow (BuildRequires(check): foo) and to pass up
disabling %check through our tooling?

 - J<