Comment # 25 on bug 1218184 from Richard Brown

> Do I understand that you are suggesting to build the kernel in devel
> projects differently in devel projects and Factory. If so, strong NACK from
> me.

I think both Jiri and I do not wish to see development differ in devel Projects
and Products

However, this bug has been open now for approaching 9 months
The failure to satisfactorily address this bug is now hindering/effectively
blocking the build of our ALP products (Comment #2)
That is why this bug is prioritised as a P1 issue.

In order to be able to continue to develop the Product line which we've
promised to our customers and investors, I'm reluctantly willing to suggest
anything which will allow us to progress.
Even if that means having a different build in devel projects and our products

After all, reviewing the comments here, all the substantive arguments against
_multibuild to date ONLY seem to apply to the devel projects.
The 'lacking controls' are controls which are not available in the OBS Projects
for Factory or our products anyway.
Therefore suggesting the devel project could still use source links as long as
the submitted kernel to our products used _multibuild seemed like a diplomatic
workaround to table.
The alternative would be to continue demanding that the long established hard
requirement for _multibuild be finally met, circular discussions would likely
continue, meanwhile ALP Product builds remain broken.

The more esoteric arguments that _multibuild is fundamentally broken are
countered by the realities of our codebase
In Factory there are a grand total of 688 packages using _multibuild (package
list attached)
This list does not include the child-packages created as a result of
multibuild. ie. this is the de-duplicated number
This includes toolchain packages like cmake, gcc, glibc and is approximately 4%
of all packages in Factory

There is only ONE package building in Factory still using source links -
kernel-source
This has been verified by exhaustively searching through all 16000+ packages
building in Factory for the presence of _link files.
The only results are the linked children of kernel-source (package list also
attached)

Given it's been demonstrated by literally everyone else working on Factory and
our ALP products that it's possible to use _multibuild, I think it's reasonable
to expect our kernel experts to also manage it.