Inflation of explicit build requirements

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 20:53, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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.


> With regard to 'cpp', the C preprocessor, it is required by 'gcc' already.
True, but ... this is technically questionable.

There actually are 3 different cpp's:
/lib/cpp
/usr/bin/cpp
and gcc's internal cpp
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/<target>/<gcc-version>/cc1

Normal packages will use /usr/bin/cpp or /usr/bin/gcc -P, which both are
part of the GCC but won't use /lib/cpp, which is a historic artifact and
is not part of the GCC.

However, nowadays, many packages still rely on /lib/cpp to be present.
Therefore these packages actually would need a "BuildRequires: /lib/cpp"

> 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.

Ralf