Linda, On Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:56:00 -0700, Linda Walsh <suse@tlinx.org>
I am complaining that one cannot use a standard suse distro machine to do a build of the source packages anymore.
You can *IF YOU BUILD THE WAY THAT'S SUPPORTED*. It has been that way for more than a decade.
Instead of building packages as they would be build by an installed distro, they are building some arbitrary subset that isn't built to work with the entire distro they ship.
For the last time: THIS HAS NEVER BEEN A SUPPORTED WAY OF BUILDING PACKAGES.
If you had such a nice new toy... and someone didn't want to use it, how well would you respond?
SUSE's primary focus is on building packages for a distribution and for that, the only reliable way is to build in a defined chrooted environment. If building packages any other way does work it's totally unsupported and more or less pure luck. This has always been so and will not change. This is an open source world, so if you want it working differently you have all the sources and are free to make the changes you want and offer your changes for adoption.
I didn't even ask them *NOT* to use it -- I asked them to change their 'base system', from a "minimum necessary" (which will NEVER represent what users have on their machines), to a full development install, which should catch 90% of the interactions between packages during build that can happen to customers -- and allow them to be fixed before they hit the customer.
This is unacceptable for an automatic build system with limited resources like SUSE uses, first its internal autobuild and then the OBS. Every package that's part of the build environment must be tracked to trigger rebuilds when any package in that environment changes. So you *must* limit the number of packages to the minum required to build the package.
But no longer do you have a distribution that's integrated and designed to work together -- but a collection of packages designed to be run and generated in only certain predictable ways.
That's *your* definition of a distribution, not neccessarily that of others.
That's not a personal computer -- that's an appliance.
Never in the times that the personal computer exists have you been guarantied that any random selection of programs will peacefully coexist.
What people are talking about is shifting SuSE from a linux-distro builder to a linux-appliance builder (or a platform for building linux appliances). That would indicate that openSuSE is removing themselves from the linux distro market, and going for a niche subset market, while still telling people they are a linux distro.
SUSE has always built packages the way you reject, so *if* your accusations would be true, we're not shifting somewhere but have always been there.
No... checking it out from OBS -- let me use svs/cvs/mercurial/git... whatever, osc hasn't worked for me yet.
No, an SCCS like svc or git is no replacement for OBS so you can't really compare them or only in certain parts. So focussing on why OBS doesn't work for you would be much better. As getting OBS to work is as easy as getting yourself an openSUSE account and installing the osc package. It has worked that way for me and for others from day one on, so I'm curious what problems you encountered.
The new system uses rpmbuild as well, I'm told -- So what directory do I 'cd' to and run my rpmbuild command?
Of cause it uses rpmbuild, but in a defined environment containing only a fixed number of base packages plus the packages required to build the one in question. Heck, by default the build environment for factory doesn't even contain autoconf, automake or makeinfo so you have to add explicit BuildRequires to the spec if they are needed. Philipp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org