Looking for reproducible RPM building / rebuilding tooling

[Simon Mudd]

Hello all,

I bumped into a YouTube talk by Holger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJEjSf1m2Q and found it interesting.

I've been trying to ensure that I could rebuild MySQL rpms (based
on upstream Oracle provided src rpms) on different OS versions
(RHEL/AlmaLinux/RockyLinux/OracleLinux) and on version 8, 9 and 10
of the OS and have some tooling
https://github.com/sjmudd/mysql-rpm-builder/ to do that, but am
looking to improve this and was looking around but could not see
any out of the box solutions.

Oracle provides the source for MySQL on
https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server but binary rpms are not built
from git but from the src rpms.  These src packages are not identical
copies of the git src code.

Documentation on Oracle's exact build process does not exist and I
found many situations where it was not actually possible to rebuild
the rpms often due to missing references to part of the build
environment (e.g. missing rpm dependencies and no references to
repos where those packages were located.)

I have sometimes also wanted to patch the source based on a
reproducible "base" build and that is something that my current
tooling now allows for.

Additionally at least in RPM world even supposedly "similar"/"identical"
distributions like RHEL / Fedora / OracleLinux / Rocky Linux /
AlmaLinux have different (but usually compatible) external repos
which may need referencing and this can make the process of ensuring
builds are reproducible harder as some customisation is required
to handle this.

So having bumped into this list I was curious if others know of any
better tooling for being able to consistently rebuild rpms from their
src rpm packages.

My use case is quite specific but I would imagine that others have
similar requirements.

Thanks for sharing any thoughts.

Regards,

Simon