[Fedora-packaging] No pre-built applications rule

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sat, 2006-09-16 at 22:08 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Hey guys,
> It's come to my attention that we don't have a "Packages must be built
> from source, no precompiled binaries" rule in the current guidelines.  I
> think this is an oversight as the Binary Firmware section:
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware
> 
> implies this for the specific case of firmware.
> 
> How about something like:
> 
> "Packages must be built from source code.  Including pre-built programs
> or libraries is strictly forbidden.  A select few exceptions are made
> for binary firmware.  Please see
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware
> for details."
> 
> And on ReviewGuidelines:
> "Must: The package must be built from source.  No pre-built programs or
> libraries are acceptable."
-1

> Thoughts, opinions welcome.

IMO, both rules above are a mistake.

In my understanding the original intend was to force "rebuildability" on
LINUX code, i.e. all Linux code to be open-sourced.

I.e. you'd first have to define what you understand as "Linux code".

A native firmware to be applied by a running Linux kernel would
definitely qualify as such. But a firmware (as being applied by
emulators) or foreign libraries (as being required by cross compilers)
are cornercases.

I find forcing to build them from source to be non-helpful, because

1. Technically, 
- Rebuilding such binaries can require very large toolchains underneath.

- The toolchains required to rebuild such binaries, often have a
circular dependency on such binaries. E.g. bootstrapping
(cross-)compilers from scratch often is not possible or at least very
hard to achieve (Applies to Linux itself, too)

- Forcing to rebuild a binary introduces a very large risk of producing
a non-usable binary from it, due to bugs in the toolchain required to
rebuild it. Fixing such bugs is far from being trivial.


2. Where to draw the line between "such binaries" and "ordinary data"?

>From a running OS's perspective, running a "non-native firmware" on in
am emulator is not any different from processing "data", e.g. displaying
a postscript document in ghostscript is essentially the same as running
a foreign firmware in an emulator.

Ralf