just looking for clarification of some of the steps in
building a custom distro (by george, i'm determined to
nail this down.)
my biggest concern is dependency testing, so let me
ask for clarification as to what happens in some of the
steps.
AFAICT, the purpose of "genhdlist" is to recreate the
contents of the hdlist and hdlist2 files, based solely on
the RPMs that are contained in the RedHat/RPMS directory.
from what i've gleaned, these files contain summaries of
all the RPMS, including things like dependencies for each
RPM, package name to file name mapping and so on. (any
other info in those files that's worth knowing? and,
just out of curiosity, is there a dump-genhdlist utility
that would print out the contents in a readable form
for debugging if things go wrong?)
however, WRT dependencies, while "genhdlist" collects
the dependency info for each RPM, it does not actually
verify that those dependencies will be satisfied by the
build tree.
as in, i deliberately removed the openldap RPM from the
build tree, even though the openldap-{client,serve} RPMs
depend on it and were in the tree. genhdlist still worked
fine, which just establishes that genhdlist really doesn't
do any dependency checking. is that about right?
the only reason i want to confirm this is to be able to
document that, just because genhdlist works, this is no
way guarantees dependencies will be satisfied later in
the build.
more to come shortly.
rday
