[WBEL-devel] Whitebox build environment

[John Morris]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Dean Mills wrote:

> What is the suggested/best/only build environment for rebuilding WB?

The idea is for WB to be self hosting, so the best build environment is 
itself.  The only package that is known to fail that test is gettext.  It 
built fine on taroon-beta and hasn't built correctly on anything after. 

> I have a server that started life as a RH 7.3 box, will that suffice or
> should I reinstall another distro/version?

Unless you are very patient, have plenty of CPU and RAM.  A full rebuild 
on a Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz with 2GB of RAM takes about 26 hours.

> Also, is there an active requirement for any dev work for WB, and if so,
> is there a to-do list?

Right now there aren't many big items outstanding.  The plan was to clean
up the trademark problems and such in RHEL for a free release, then only
track RH's errata.  So until the RHEL 4 beta kicks off things are kinda in
a quiet period.  Off the top of my head though:

1.  Find a solution to the gettext problem.  If a security issue arises in
that package before a reliable way of rebuilding it is discovered things
will get "interesting" mighty fast.

2.  up2date works, but is still a sub-optimal solution.  Even after
update1's changes there is still work that needs doing there.  Much of it
would also be welcome by other efforts, things like getting package size
info correctly reporting when accessing yum repositories.  Another much 
needed addition would be support for round robin selection of 
repositories.  Yum itself supports it but up2date doesn't.

3.  As others have noted on the list, I am NOT an artist.  Some of the 
replacement artwork could stand replacing, but whether new packages should 
issue just for that is a subject I'd like some input on.  But new art 
could probably go in when the ISOs get respun and certainly would be nice 
to have as 4.0 approaches around the end of the year.  One big one that 
stands out for me is the stock GNOME foot not meshing with the rest of the 
pretty BlueCurve icons on the panel.

Anyone want to nominate any additions to the list?

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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