CentOS - Feb 2011 - Significant speedup of package building with mock from EPEL for RHEL 6, should definitely go in CentOS 5

The speedups in building RPM's with "mock" from the EPEL packages
for
RHEL 6 are *profound*, especially if your environment is like mine and
you have thousands of user id's. The issue seems to be the handling of
"/var/log/lastlog" and similar files, which are otherwise quite large
and take significant time to compress and uncompress when laying out
new mock environments.

Karabhir, what are the odds of encouragng a switch to
http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-epel/6/mock-1.1.8-1.el6.src.rpm, and
backporting it to centos/5/5/extras ? It's working very well for me,
and I think it would be a helpful improvement in RPM building for both
the CentOs 5.6 and CentOS 6 efforts.

On 02/02/2011 01:01 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Karabhir, what are the odds of encouragng a switch to
> http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-epel/6/mock-1.1.8-1.el6.src.rpm, and
> backporting it to centos/5/5/extras ? It's working very well for me,
> and I think it would be a helpful improvement in RPM building for both
> the CentOs 5.6 and CentOS 6 efforts.
Performance isnt really a problem we need to solve on the 
centos-buildsys side of things; however keeping things consistent is an 
issue. Because of the way things have changed in mock >= 0.8 I'm 
hesitant to change what we have in production for c3/4/5 since we know 
it works and it works across the entire distro tree from 4.0 to 5.6

So having the choice of the newer mock in epel isnt a bad thing as such, 
its just that the newer ver of mock isnt what is used internally within 
centos.

Having said that, for centos6 we will almost certainly end up with a 
newer mock, at the moment its 1.1.3 ( slightly modified and has a few 
patches from 1.1.3+ ); but once we are ready to release we can bring in 
a newer mock, do a few tests and have that in c6/extras.

- KB