On Sun, 5 Jun 2011, Chris Tyler wrote:
Right -- but the next question is, what can you build with that
"minimal
build chroot"? The answer well under half -- closer to 1/3 -- of the
Fedora package collection. So the question becomes, what is the minimum
seed set needed to produce the entire package collection? And where are
there circular dependencies?
I think a better question is to ask: what is needed in
distribution design first -- what 'target' is desired?
Server, developer's workstation, end user's media device,
whatever
Simply saying 'everything in another's design' _may_ be a
later goal, but cannot be the first goal, or else one will end
up blocked on some obsolete package that no-one uses, and not
attain much of anything
I say this having been involved in splitting out a server
oriented subset rebuild of the RHEL 6 sources, this spring.
If we had implemented 'firstboot' we would have carried in
huge GUI and sound tool and library dependeciess that are
simply not in scope
Circular build dependencies are not really a big deal -- one
codes around them to break the circularlty, to bootstrap into
an intitial solve, then re-build from that partial solve, into
the full set -- see, eg, in Java space:
[herrold@bronson alpine]$ yum list \*nodep\*
Available Packages
ant-nodeps.i386
... similarly on the RHEL 6 sources, there was a
non-self-hosting circular dependency on valgrinnd and the
OpenMPI drivers
They happen, they get worked around .. no big deal
-- Russ herrold