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

[Vít Ondruch]

Dne 22.12.2014 v 10:46 Ralf Corsepius napsal(a):
> On 12/22/2014 10:15 AM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
>> Dne 20.12.2014 v 18:55 Jason L Tibbitts III napsal(a):
>>> 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.
>>
>> First step is to have really minimal build root. For me that means to
>> get rid of Perl from it. I hope that Perl guys are slowly working on
>> fixing their packages.
>
> To me, what you say is a religious statement, which doesn't have any
> immediate benefits, but already has shown its harmful nature because
> is already is causing malfunctions.

As well as broken Perl caused malfunctions of PPC builders.

>
> On a wider scope, I'd agree to gradually minimizing Fedora's
> buildroots, which would mean to gradually remove implicit package deps
> and making package requirements more explicit.
>
> So, why not remove all scripted languages from buildroots and require
> them to be explicitly BR:'d and R:'ed?

I agree with these of course. And I'd go one step further and remove
also gcc, gcc-c++ and make. These are not needed for most of packages
for scripting languages. Considering the amount of packages which are
using Python, Perl, Ruby, Nodejs, Java and name your favourite scripting
language here, the gcc & co is mostly useless.


Vít