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Bug 2010322

Summary: Add yasm to CRB
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Reporter: Neal Gompa <ngompa13>
Component: yasmAssignee: Nick Clifton <nickc>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: qe-baseos-tools-bugs
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: CentOS StreamCC: bstinson, carl, davide, daxelrod, fedora, jwboyer, mnewsome, nickc
Target Milestone: rcFlags: pm-rhel: mirror+
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
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Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-10-19 10:50:46 UTC Type: Task
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Neal Gompa 2021-10-04 13:08:21 UTC
Description of problem:
yasm is needed for building some packages in EPEL 9 (notably, at least p7zip requires it). Please ship it to allow EPEL packages to use it.

Comment 1 Neal Gompa 2021-10-04 13:17:27 UTC
MR proposed to resolve this: https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/release-engineering/comps/-/merge_requests/138

Comment 5 Nick Clifton 2021-10-06 10:38:41 UTC
Hi Neal,

  Adding yasm to the CRB is something that we would prefer not to do.  Yasm is stale software (it has not been updated since 2014), and supporting it for 10+ years just enable other packages to build is undesirable.  Instead we suggest two possible workarounds:

  1. Convert yasm-dependent packages to use either gas (preferred) or nasm.
  2. Bundle yasm with the packages that need it.

I am sorry to disappoint you, but without a strong business case to justify the cost of supporting yasm, it really does not make sense to add it to the CRB.

Cheers
  Nick

Comment 6 Neal Gompa 2021-10-06 11:28:42 UTC
Hold up, what? Yasm isn't dead.

It moved to GitHub years ago and it had a commit as recent as June of this year! The last release was in 2019 with version 1.3.0, but it's still actively developed.

See https://github.com/yasm/yasm

Comment 7 Neal Gompa 2021-10-06 11:29:30 UTC
(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #6)
> Hold up, what? Yasm isn't dead.
> 
> It moved to GitHub years ago and it had a commit as recent as June of this
> year! The last release was in 2019 with version 1.3.0, but it's still
> actively developed.
> 

Err, July of this year...

Comment 8 Nick Clifton 2021-10-06 11:45:13 UTC
Sorry - a google search for "yasm" brings up the old URL as the first hit: https://yasm.tortall.net.

Still the point is that we already have two assemblers (gas and nasm) and supporting a third is hard to justify.

Comment 9 Neal Gompa 2021-10-06 15:48:24 UTC
(In reply to Nick Clifton from comment #8)
> Sorry - a google search for "yasm" brings up the old URL as the first hit:
> https://yasm.tortall.net.
> 
> Still the point is that we already have two assemblers (gas and nasm) and
> supporting a third is hard to justify.

Aren't these assemblers generally incompatible with each other? I've rarely seen it possible to swap assemblers in projects. The p7zip project uses yasm for x86_64.

Comment 10 Nick Clifton 2021-10-06 15:59:30 UTC
(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #9)
Hi Neal,

> Aren't these assemblers generally incompatible with each other? I've rarely
> seen it possible to swap assemblers in projects. The p7zip project uses yasm
> for x86_64.

My understanding is that yasm and nasm are meant to be very similar.  So switching from one to the other should not take too much effort.  Porting from yasm to gas would be harder, but might be worth it to gain access to features supported by that assembler.

Also - this might be a bit heretical but - does p7zip really need to use assembly code ?  Presumably it was put in for performance reasons, but if the assembler was replaced with ordinary compiled code, would anyone notice ?  (The point being that avoiding assembly the code makes the package a lot more portable to other architectures, and there is one less dependency too).

Cheers
  Nick

Comment 11 Josh Boyer 2021-10-06 16:03:27 UTC
I think we should refocus here.  RHEL offers nasm and gas already, and we recommend using those.  Whether packages outside of the RHEL offerings use yasm is orthogonal to RHEL providing it.  Perhaps it would be best to close this bug as WONTFIX and work with the EPEL community to package yasm instead.

Comment 12 Neal Gompa 2021-10-17 18:57:45 UTC
I've made the EPEL 9 request in bug 2014898.

Comment 13 Nick Clifton 2021-10-18 15:12:49 UTC
(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #12)
> I've made the EPEL 9 request in bug 2014898.

Given that - are you happy for me to close this BZ ?

Comment 14 Neal Gompa 2021-10-18 16:22:35 UTC
(In reply to Nick Clifton from comment #13)
> (In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #12)
> > I've made the EPEL 9 request in bug 2014898.
> 
> Given that - are you happy for me to close this BZ ?

If you want, sure.

Comment 15 Nick Clifton 2021-10-19 10:50:46 UTC
Request moved to EPEL