mock goals and non-goals

[seth vidal]

Hi folks,
 Given the patchfest from yesterday I felt it would be best to have some
discussion of goals/non-goals for mock in/around fedora's build
environment.

This is my opinion on the subject. It is not final nor terminal, it just
is where I am:


goals:
- make clean and consistent build environments to be used by fedora's
buildsystem and packagers
- simplify building and testing process for packagers
- be able to canonically identify the 'build environment' for fedora
systems to discourage confusion on what should be where
- simple interface with good defaults.

non-goals:
- this is not a tool to manage many, many builds with queuing, etc -
that is plague.



So, with regard to the patches we've seen so far here's what makes sense
to me:
- global/shared config to reduce the replication in the mock configs
- specifying multiple srpms on the command line for a SINGLE config -
provided that the buildroot is refreshed/cleaned each time - unless, of
course, the --no-clean option is passed in
- caching mechanism to create a cached pristine chroot that will allow
for quickly recreating the chroot into that state simply by putting that
cached copy back. 

Patches that don't make sense to me:
- multiconfig - this is what shells and/or plague is for, use one of
them.
- parallel builds - plague is your friend.


Patches which I am ambivalent about:
- the fake buildreqs/sneaky buildreqs patch for rebuilding items with
BROKEN buildrequires:
   - I hate the idea of enabling broken shit
   - I realize that there are lots of broken things that people need to
work around and I'm sympathetic to that, to some extent. Doesn't mean I
can't hate it.


so, there, my flames are all away, feel free to bombard me with your
own.

-sv