macrofied kernel.spec

[Jarod Wilson]

Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 04:34:43PM -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> Damn, it'd be nice if koji could spread kernel variant builds of the
>> same arch across multiple builders...
> 
> That's not difficult to do - just have exactly one kernel built in the
> specfile and pass the flavour on the rpmbuild command line in koji.
> 
> Same is already happening with the kmdl builds since quite some time:
> Each one is an independent build entity, just copy the idioms from
> there.
> 
> Of course koji needs to support several builds per src.rpm which it
> already does in a way, and also to pass custom --define arguments to
> the builds, but that's not difficult to embed in koji and would make
> koji also the platform of choice for building kmdls (which is not an
> argument for Fedora-internal consumption, but for wider spread use of
> koji).

With the desire to spin kernel-vanilla rpms off the same source rpm as 
the current fedora kernels in a way that they aren't scratch builds, 
I've talked to release engineering about adding support for passing 
custom flags through the build system before.

Unfortunately, they're currently against adding said support, both 
because of the technical work that would have to be done, and because of 
some policy matters. If we let builds pass in random flags, the end 
result binaries might be different than a simple rpmbuild --rebuild 
would be, we're less sure what was actually built, people could do crazy 
things, etc., etc., etc. (paraphrasing rel-eng loosely there).

Despite that, I'd certainly still like the functionality added, even if 
its use were restricted to kernels (just what rel-eng wants, more 
exceptions for the kernel!). Heck, if we could get same-arch kernel 
variant builds going across multiple build hosts from a single 'make 
build' invocation, we could maybe even turn on building of a 
kernel-vanilla package by default without incurring a massive slowdown 
in 'make build' to 'all builds finished'...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com