Build system ideas/requirements

[Elliot Lee]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> 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.

Providing consistent buildroots actually works against reproducible builds
in the long term, because of the effect those buildroots have on the way
people choose to package things.

For maximum quality control, packages should not be affected by having an
unrelated (non-BuildRequires and non-base) package installed in the
buildroot. If package X is is unrelated to the ongoing build of package Y,
then package Y's build should not be affected by the absence OR presence
of package X in the buildroot.

The root cause of the problem here is not really having consistent
buildroots, but having improper packaging that doesn't account for all
possible variables. One thing we have internally at Red Hat is a mass
rebuild system that creates a buildroot with all packages installed,
attempts rebuilds of all packages, and for the builds that succeed, it
compares the resulting binary packages against the original ones to see if
things like filelist or dependencies have changed.  It'd be nice to get
the equivalent of that for Fedora.

Best,
-- Elliot