On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 10:26:07PM +0100, Josef Wolf wrote:
When we totally rely on the build service, we might reach a point that we can not build without this service anymore, no matter whether we have the sources or not. So there's the risk that we would not be able to build anymore, should this service become unavailable at some time in the future.
As the build service uses the standard tools for package building (rpmbuild for rpms and the corresponding debian tool for debs), this situation should never happen, even if we, hypothetically, at some point in time go bonkers and shut down the build service. You don't need the build service to build a source package hosted in the build service, but you might need some additional files/tools over plain rpmbuild: - if the spec file uses build service specific %macros, you need the macro definitions, or you have to reimplement them (or change the spec file not to use them any more) - with plain rpmbuild nobody is going to setup a chroot environment for you and install all your BuildRequires. This means it's a lot more manual work to build a package without the build service (but, well, that's the whole point of tools like the build service: to make life easier) That's all I can think of now, but I'm sure I missed something. I don't know much about packaging innards on the debian sides but it's probably similar to rpm. But still: if you use the build service, you have to know how the packaging tools work, and if you know how they work, you should be able to build the packages by hand as well. In any case, and as was already pointed out, this is one of the reasons why it is so important that the build service is open source -- in the very worst case, if you rely on the build service for whatever reason and it goes away, you can take the sources and a starving computer science student or two and set up your own. If you are interested in the details of what is implemented on top of rpmbuild, you should really look at the sources, and ask on opensuse-buildservice@opensuse.org for everything that's not clear. cheers, Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder (skh@suse.de) SUSE Research & Development ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE Linux Products GmbH GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org