Hi! I've seen quite a few JIRAs to that effect opened by Guo. Instead of reacting to each individual one, I'd like to open up a more broad discussion.
First of all, when we say toolchain, what we really mean at this point is the Puppet code maitained under bigtop_toolchain/ This is our way of maintaining the state for the build environment in which Bigtop packages are built (this could be real slaves, docker images, etc.). In general, a package should be part of the toolchain IFF it is mentioned as a build-time dependency in both DEB and RPM spec. With this in mind, I think the JIRAs should really be about maitenance of our build dependencies rather than just 'add $FOO to the toolchain'. IOW, if something is not a build dependency there's no reason for it to be in the toolchain, unless it is a *missing* build dependency. In the later case the JIRA should really be about correcting a missing build dependency in RPM/DEB. Finally, what would be really awesome is if we could invest in an automated way of maintaining our toolchain. If anybody has any ideas of how to harvest build dependencies from RPM/DEB specs -- please let me know. Thanks, Roman.
