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