[WBEL-devel] Choosing a RHEL rebuild project

[Milan Kerslager]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 10:09:51PM +0100, Henk van Lingen wrote:
> 
> (hm, caos website seems down right now) What's the reletion between
> caos and centos, the last seems to be build with tools from the first,
> iirc. What's the point or the advantage of being 'self-hosted'? I had the
> impression (probably wrong) that that was mainly 'for the fun of it' or
> 'to be totally free', or whatever.

Self-hosting means (in this case) that you are able to compile the
system on itself (ie: install full system, compile all SRC packages and
you will have the same binaries you installed).

But self-hosting mean you will not have proper QA (Quality Assurance)
because you must not touch your building system after you deeply test it
(to be sure that building system produces correct binaries).

The problem is when you find a bug in some package (in core library for
example). If you put a fixed package to the build system, you have to
throw whole QA process for building system and you have to make QA again
(first for build system and then for all rebuilded packages). But there
will be other fixes... so making true-QA-self-hosted system is a little
bit hard.

At the end - WBEL, Centos and Tao are only toys (sorry guys), because we
are trying to do what could not be easily done. And yes - Tao is trying
to follow RH's process wery closely (ie. compare binaries with true
RHEL3 and thus prove them more than WORKSFORME - this means that some
packages in Tao are builded on RH9).

But don't be shy. We have source with patches from RH so QA process is
partly done before we touch them.

-- 
                        Milan Kerslager
                        E-mail: milan.kerslager@pslib.cz
                        WWW:    http://www.pslib.cz/~kerslage/