On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 01:13:12PM +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
Hi Arjan,
> > I just read about Red Hat ABE (Application Build Environment) which
> > seems to be something similar to mach.
>
> the goals are very similar to mach, but mach uses apt which made it not
> suitable as basis for the ABE
I have to bite here :)
Given that
a) mach has been used by some people over some time;
b) people working on mach have repeatedly tried to discuss with Red Hat
and said "hey, we'd like to work with you on a build system to be used
by all", as part of the "community" project that is Fedora; but no
attempts were made from Red Hat to unify forces;
c) nothing more was ever offered as negative feedback on mach than "it
uses apt" (a fact that is easily changeable, obviously);
d) you could easily have asked "hey, can't mach be made to not use apt,
but do (insert random feature you would like)"
why did the "NIH" syndrome that Red Hat sometimes displays wins out over
the desire to involve the community in the "community" project ?
mach has a different goal than the ABE. Add the apt/yum use of mach (which
for the goal mach has, is perfectly fine) and I made the call that using mach
for the ABE was not a real option. You call it NIH. Shrug. I started out by
looking at mach to see if it could be adjusted, but it didn't look like it
could be without compromising what mach was made for.
I realize that you probably don't care, and that you have a job
to do,
and it's already hard enough as it is, and sometimes it's just easier to
Do Your Own Thing to Get The Job Done. And this is very much not a
personal flame at you, just a flame at Red Hat in general.
In this case it's very much a case of different goals of different tools.
They somewhat look the same (and that's why I started by looking at mach)
but they really are not. (and the ABE you see today is not the ABE in the
projected roadmap)
For a fedora buildsystem, mach is 100x better than the ABE will ever be, and
I really would suggest anyone here to use mach if they want to build
packages for fedora.