OK. I've had a little sleep. We got into that argument because I was cranky with lack of sleep and you don't know all that much about my background and you may have misjudged my intent and the impact of this particular issue, both in its importance to users and in the amount of work it implies. Alexander Bokovoy's response is informative about both of the later points. Thank you Alexander.
Progress: I'm loading the RH 7.3 distribution disk 3 as I type this. Plan Thread A: 1) put the RH 7.3 distribution on-line for my own use. 2) extract the dependency information from the distribution. 3) extract the .spec files for RH samba and rpm. 4) compare RH's samba .spec file with yours. Also, your 2.2.5 and 2.2.3a. 5) identify what belongs in the BuildRequires section. I was thinking that anything already in the rpm-build requirements could have been dropped, but I realize now that that would have made the correctness of your builds dependent on the accuracy of the rpm-build spec. I'll try to make the list as complete as possible, and annotate which build options require which additional packages. I suspect that this will have some impact on the binary requirements as well. I'm not an expert on all the configuration options, and the choice of options will change the dependencies. I'm almost certainly going to need some help with this. I'll do what I can to get this started, but it may be something that one of the core SaMBa team is going to want to maintain over the long haul. Of course, that will be your choice. Plan Thread B: 1) find out why the two builds are different sizes. 2) actually install the 2.2.5 kit I built. 3) check it for problems. 4) apply RH updates to other packages. 5) rebuild 2.2.5 distribution if needed. I think that means I will have to post my results only when A5 is done, but I may post progress reports at A4, B1, B3, B4 and B5 if anything significant turns up. As a practical matter, most of thread B is more immediate than thread A. Exportables: 1) A report on the interaction of configure options and dependencies. 2) A working BuildRequires section for SaMBa.org's 2.2.5 vs RH 7.3 baseline distribution. This is part of the 'do it at least once before you automate it' section of my larger build automation project. (That was described here some time ago, and it has morphed more than a little since I posted it, but you may be able to see how this fits in with a little imagination. The biggest change in that plan is that VMWare can be used instead of a bunch of removable disks and extra computers.) mtew
