Help me triage

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 01:32:12PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 12:25 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 04:30:15PM -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I'm trying to meet a (probably overly aggressive) personal goal of 
> > > having zero NEW rawhide bugs (which are not Package Reviews) by the time 
> > > of Fedora 10 GA.  Along the way I thought I'd post some of the questions 
> > > and issues I see while triaging these bugs so we can all learn.  I 
> > > encourage others to do the same.  I've just knocked the list down to 
> > > close to 500!
> > > 
> > > If you want to join in and help the query for NEW rawhide bugs excluding 
> > > package reviews is here: http://tinyurl.com/6llac8
> > > 
> > > Here is what I have so far:
> > > 
> > > # Is there a general policy around using perl in pre/post ?
> > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462996
> > 
> > Not that I know of, but it is good practice to avoid creating unneccessary
> > dependancies if there are alternatives, particularly if the choice is between
> > a large package &  small package. Many perl scripts can be done just as well 
> > with a short piece of awk/sed. This makes it much easier for people who want
> > to build minimal/small Fedora images because they don't unneccessarily
> > bring in the entire of Perl just for a %post script. Not that I want to single
> > out perl - the same rationale would apply to unneccessary use of python, if
> > the use in question could be easily written in awk/sed.
> 
> Fully agreed, but ... consider both python and perl 
> * are part of the base-packages Fedora is based on.

That list of base packages is pretty arbitrary, basically chosen as 
suitable for a general purpose Fedora deployment. If you are creating
derived distributions or appliance images you may not be building a 
general purpose OS anymore, and as such plenty of packages can be
dropped - if the dependancies are created in an intelligent way. In
recent times Fedora is actually pretty good in this respect - sometimes
we find crazy deps when building minimal oVirt images, but packages
maintainers have been very good at addresing bugs like this when we've
found them.

> * there are other dependencies adding much more bloat to "minimal
> installs"

Again, don't think of minimal install in terms of what Fedora defines
for its general purpose spin, because minimal has a different definition
depending on your use case.

> That said, though it's advisable to avoid anything outside of POSIX in
> specs' %pre/%post, I don't any pressing need to push people at avoid
> perl or python.

I don't want to specify an exclusion for particular packages - I just
want people to evaluate the situation and take into account the 
dependancy chains they're introducing & whether they're truely justified.
All too often Perl/Python are used when there's no compelling need for
them to be - other times their use is justified. 

Daniel
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