[Yum] Autorebuild...

Robert G. Brown rgb at phy.duke.edu
Fri Sep 26 16:16:45 UTC 2003


In a conversation on the beowulf list, the following idea occurred to
me.  I don't remember if it has been discussed on the list already or
not, but for version 3.x, future super-yum, I think that it would be
really spiffy if in addition to binary rpm repositories yum supported
source rpm repositories.

On a modern system, an rpm --rebuild for many packages takes anywhere
from a few seconds to as much as a few minutes and the system is quite
usable while the build is going on.

I suggest this because it occurs to me that a very "interesting"
solution to the dilemna of future systems support with distribution
vendors trying to crank up significant marginal profits on a per-host
basis might be to convert the linux/package paradigm altogether so that
it is potentiall src rpm based.  Sure, it is now, but it isn't EASY now
-- you really have to be pretty smart, pretty good, to deal with rpm
builds because of (surprise) dependency issues and occasional
compatibility issues.

If yum as a client app could do transparent build from source rpm's, the
marginal effort of an "upgrade" could be significantly reduced, as could
the dependency on any distribution vendor at all.  This might not work
for all kinds of packages -- some of them deal with hardware and
complicated collectives of libraries and applications -- but it might
work just fine for >>most<< of the packages in a given distribution.
Furthermore, if the tool is built to support the paradigm, people will
start building repositories and even assembling distributions that work
with the paradigm.

A future yum repository might well >>fundamentally<< be a source rpm
directory, with yum-arch and yum2rpm as tools to organize them and
optionally transmogrify them into a distribution set.

Just thinking of ways to break us out of distribution/revision slavery.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu






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