Build requirements

[Alexander Bokovoy]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 06:38:43AM +0930, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> The BuildRequires field seems to be to only be relevant to a source RPM. 
> Why even bother to put it into the SPEC file for the binary RPMs we 
> supply, because it represents a lot of work that must be checked each time 
> we release a package for a different Linux distro. Some of those distros 
> were packaging the same thing in different places and had slightly 
> different names as well.
Richard, you're slightly wrong here. We have spec files for particular
distributions in Samba CVS and for RH as well. In these spec files (for
various RedHat versions) specific requirements for building package should
be specified. They don't change much from RH's release to release and same
is true for any other Linux rpm-based vendor. Without BuildRequires:
chances to build package by an user is much lower -- as every user has to
investigate build dependencies every time he is building Samba packages
from our spec files. 

> To provide that sort of information for all the platforms that Samba runs 
> on would be a large undertaking, and to a certain extent, a waste of time 
> as well, because things change. 
No, it isn't a waste of time. I don't think (and my opinion is based on
4-5 years of working on maintaining samba and other software in several
distributions) that dependancies are so fluid. Things change indeed but
such changes occur less than twice per year usually and can be easily
detected by users _if_ they already have an example in spec file with
BuildRequires: for previous supported version of the distribution (RH in
this case).

The task to fill in BuildRequires: is actually important with recent
release of apt-rpm 0.5.4 which has ability to fetch and build source rpm
from apt repository and which is heavily relies on BuildRequires: tag to
gather list of binary packages which must be installed on target system to
properly build a package (automatically, by the way).

> Also, none of us have a huge amount of time on our hands, so we focus 
> on the things that seem relevant.
Let people who have such time and/or previous experience to report us
dependencies and put them into CVS' spec files.

-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy
---
The ripest fruit falls first.
		-- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"