On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 04:52:42PM -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote: > ( I have also posted this topic here: > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/would-your-package-be-easier-to-build-if-you-could-select-specific-releases-of-dependencies/202746 > ) > > I’ve used Red Hat / Fedora systems for almost 30 years. As an SRE, > one of the things that has been most valuable to me has been not > just the distribution, but RPM as a build tool. The spec files > offered reusable, composable build workflows designed by people with > experience integrating components into a coherent system. > > Earlier this year, I proposed an initiative that was mostly aimed at > improving our build processes. Fedora’s systems are great for > building Fedora, but it’s sometimes difficult to extend them to > build applications *for* Fedora. In particular, large, complex > applications tend to be compatible with specific releases of their > dependencies, and as their dependency tree grows deeper, it also > becomes less likely that it can coexist inside the distribution with > similarly complex applications.
This has been discussed endlessly everywhere before and I doubt we're going to find agreement here. So here's my opinionated answer. There are two approaches. The one I'm going to call the Good One (my opinion) is that we build a coherent distribution with one version of each package. Libraries are built with stable APIs and backwards compatibility in mind. Programs are flexible about their dependencies. Changes go upstream. Security vulnerabilities are fixed once. (And yes, this is all a bit more work and requires people to actually act like professional engineers.) The Bad One is we just chuck everything together and do what works, without caring about the long term. This is certainly effective at making something that works, but hides long term debt, including serious security issues, which matters more than ever. > I recently completed a prototype of a couple of tools that I used to > package vLLM, because it exhibits those characteristics. I tried to get a bunch of LLM stuff working the other day, and because the field is moving fast (but also because seemingly no one cares about backwards compatibility and good engineering) it was a big headache building everything from source on Fedora. This will settle down as the technology itself settles down and matures. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
