fc5 goals

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Tom Lane wrote:

> The moral I draw is that subdividing stuff comes at a nontrivial
> cost in making software able to function well in more and more
> subtly different environments.  The above-described behavior is
> not a bug for Red Hat's version of glibc, but I say that it damn
> well is a bug for SuSE.  Do we want to go down that path?

I do agree that providing too many configurations would
open the door to several scenarios like the one you depicted.

However, one of my co-workers uses Gentoo and he's used to be
able to compile-in and compile-out core components such as
ldap, audit and even locale support.  He does that using
package options exposed by emerge, similar to "rpmbuild --with foo".
Such changes affect several packages distribution-wise, from
Firefox to bash.

I don't know how much is zealotism and how much is true, but
my mate keeps telling me everything keeps working and even
*building* flawlessly whatever funny option combinations he
chooses.  Some Gentoo scripts I've seen seem to test for
missing features and alternative implementations where
needed.

I'm very impressed.  How do the Gentoo people manage to test
their distro with so many configurations?  I believe they
still have a much smaller user and developer base than ours.
Answering this question would be interesting from a
development process point of view.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/