Inflation of explicit build requirements

[Michael Schwendt]

The appearance of explicit build requirements like 'gcc-c++', 'cpp' (!),
'perl' or even 'sed' in a couple of src.rpms indicates that there are
different opinions on what packages are considered as belonging into a
fundamental build environment.

I'm afraid that if this trend continues, packages will soon buildrequire
'make', 'findutils', 'gcc', 'gawk' and others. This kind of inflation of
explicit build dependencies would be both insane and limiting. Limiting in
that it enforces dependencies on fragile package names and specific
compiler packages. Insane in that some programs, such as those in the
'coreutils' suite, should be expected to be installed even in a minimum
build system.

If such build dependencies are added only to fix the chroot'ed build
environments as set up by tools like 'mach', package developers, please
fix mach's default config (yes, mach can be customized!) instead and
include more common tools in the 'build' definition. C++, Python and Perl
are way too common. Even rpm-build requires and uses Perl already.

With regard to 'cpp', the C preprocessor, it is required by 'gcc' already.
'sed' or /bin/sed are required by many other core packages, such as
'initscripts' or 'dev'.

Additionally, when building for Fedora.us Extras (and 'mach' has special
target definitions for fedora.us), there is the 'fedora-rpmdevtools'
package which depends on a set of very common development packages (some
which are required by rpm-build already anyway) and which are available in
the build system:

    /bin/bash, /bin/sh, bzip2, cpio, diffutils, gcc, gcc-c++, gzip, make,
    patch, perl, python, redhat-rpm-config, rpm-build, rpm-python, sed,
    tar, unzip

Please, let's avoid inflation of explicit build requirements in spec
files.

End-users either have the 'development-tools' (as defined in comps.xml)
installed or not. If not, their src.rpm rebuild attempts would fail anyway
when configure scripts check for GCC. So don't aim at complete build
requirements to please end-users.

Better let's discuss whether above set should be extended. E.g. with
'gettext' and 'desktop-file-utils', as they are needed by many src.rpms.

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