Build system ideas/requirements

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Warren Togami wrote:

> seth vidal wrote:
>> Items for thoughts:
>> 
>> 1. build system using comps.xml for chroot install definitions (base,
>> build, minimal) - it would make sense and we could leverage the
>> groupinstall/update/remove mechanism in yum.
>
> I have no objection to yum groupinstall, but in my opinion none of the 
> current defined groups are suitable for a minimal buildroot.  There have been 
> objections in the past to this with the opinion that the "Development" tools 
> group and -devel packages should be assumed to be installed in this minimum 
> buildroot.  However this is a bad assumption because the set of -devel 
> packages has been arbitrary, and dependencies don't make sure that particular 
> tools exist in the buildroot.
>
> For this reason none of the existing groups are suitable for the most 
> important goal of the minimum buildroot: reproducible binary payloads.

Minimal buildroot isn't necessary for reproducible builds, a 
*consistently* populated buildroot is. You'll get a consistent environment 
by dropping in Base + Devel groups with yum groupinstall even with the 
stock comps.xml.

Absolute bare minimum buildroot is a nice bonus in a way but by no means a 
requirement for build system to be useful IMHO. Me thinks concentrating on 
getting a *working build system, now* is at this point far more important 
than playing "how minimal can you get"-games. Just my 5cents. :)

 	- Panu -