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

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/22/2014 11:55 AM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> 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.

And? This is Red Hat's problem. I think hardly anybody outside of RH 
these days has access to PPC-HW, so if RH wants to support the PPC, RH 
will have to fix the bugs being encountered themselfs.

What Red Hat's crusade (That's what I call it) against Perl has done at 
other places (replacing fully functional tools with half functional 
replacements) is RH to cause bugs - I regret but this is's a situation, 
which really annoys and upsets me.

>> 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.
Except that I'd consider this to be non-implementable and non-realistic 
in short terms, I'd not be opposed to this. That's why I am taking about 
"gradually".

> These are not needed for most of packages
> for scripting languages.
Right, but they are BR:'s of all packages most and R:'s of many 
packages. Also, perl is a requirement of autotools-based packages => So, 
the win will be not be as overwhelming as you probably assume.


Ralf