mock and fc5/fe5 and comps pain

[Mike McLean]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> The incompatibility is more in the repo metadata than in yum -- yum
> 2.4.x (which is what's on the build hosts) doesn't understand the new
> comps format.  And that's partly because the comps side of things has
> had a lot less thought and effort put into making sure that it covers
> the needs of the userbase.  And I'm going to go out on a limb and say
> that I expect this _not_ to be the last time it changes... we're
> actually starting to use the information and so I'm all but certain that
> we'll find things that we hadn't considered.

I was thinking more along the lines of the "new yum can't parse old 
comps" issue. If it could, it seems like we could just migrate to the 
new yum in the buildsystem.

For that matter, if the old yum could be told to ignore comps on a 
per-repo basis, we could work around it that way.

>>Let me throw out another possibility. Add a mock config option named 
>>buildcomps containing a url. If this option is present, have mock parse 
>>that comps and issue the appropriate yum install commands instead of a 
>>groupinstall.
> 
> Then mock has to grow how to parse a comps file.  And which format
> should be preferred?  If we were to go that route, we're better off just
> putting a list of packages in the mock config file, but that's just
> painful from a maintenance perspective, IMHO

Well, there's pain all around. Personally I think having to rebuild 
packages every time I make a buildgroups change is painful. I also think 
that being required to have fake packages in my buildroots is annoying.

At least with my suggestion you can point mock at a comps file you are 
confident it will be able to parse. By making it a url, you can still 
centralize that portion of the config.