Dependencies
Chris Wilson pointed me to a fix for the xterm font rendering problems I’ve been seeing on my Intel graphics laptop with Fedora 14. The fonts on each new xterm are corrupted until I resize it. I first blamed the Intel X driver (there were other xterm fixes in the past), but according to Chris it’s a compiz problem.
Anyways now I wanted to rebuild compiz-core to include the patch and see if it helps. First it took some time to figure out how to install source rpms with yum (summary: yum doesn’t support it; I guess I’m spoiled from zypper). Then
I ask yum to install all the -devel rpms which are dependencies for compiz-core’s source rpm. I got a full screen full of dependencies, culminating in yum asking me to install mysql-server. Yes, mysql-server to build a simple source rpm.
I guess it was taken in through some other dependencies, but installing a full database server for building some rpm is just crazy. I balked at that.
I guess I need to find now a script similar to SUSE’s build that builds in chroot or build it in build service
Fedora is not the only distribution with dependency hell. Some years ago I found out that one openSUSE released had a dependency from fvwm2 to gnome-print (which pulled in a lot of the rest of gnome)
Update: Fedora fixed this now with an update (see bug 614542) I’m really glad that the feels like 10 GB updates every day actually contain at least one valuable fix.