Re: util-linux missing from build root

[Michael Schwendt <mschwendt tmp0701 nospam arcor de>]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:08:40 +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 02:55:12PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:10:57 +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> > 
> > > I also considered util-linux, when jnovy mentioned that a package
> > > needs "kill" to build properly.  But I came to a conclusion that
> > > "kill", "mount", nor any other command from util-linux doesn't have
> > > to be in the minimal buildroot.
> > 
> > arch, flock, getopt, rename  are nice to have by default.
> 
> well, might be nice, but I'm afraid we need to be more exact.
> 
> Could you please find out or estimate, for each of the utils you
> mentioned:
> - how many upstream tarballs do not build without it?
>   - if they do not build, is it a transparent error, or
>     is it a hard-to-debug problem (builds but does not work in
>     certain special cases, for eample)?
> - how many spec files call the utility?
> 
> If the number of packages affected is small, and if the broken
> packages are easy to discover and fix, we can leave util-linux out.

Hyperbole. If such an enormous effort is needed to justify adding a
core package, it is certainly not worth it. It would require burning
cycles on thousands of tarballs, builds and checker-scripts to see
whether a tarball disables features or self-tests when a tool is
missing.

The "initscripts" package used to require "util-linux". For a package
that is available on the majority of Fedora/RHEL installations, I
don't see any reason to make it a special optional build requirement.

I'd rather add a generated set of buildroot packages to spec files
and save the time.