lbuild's nonstandard build process is making improvements in lustre's build and packaging systems far more difficult than it should be. We really need to move beyond lbuild's non-standard approach.

To support proper build procedures for rpm-based distributions, we need a build farm that is capable of building rpms the way that stnards distros like Fedora do it. One approach would be to use mock. Another approach would be to boot a new VM instances for every build on every single version of each Linux distribution. The VM instances would be launched from many known clean, basic images.

Each piece of software that we want to build should have a .src.rpm. That .src.rpm should have all proper dependencies expressed to allow it to be built under mock and other similar processes.

We'll need something that sits on top of mock to coordinate the build of dependant packages. At LLNL we use a home-grown script, that honestly has probably exceeded its lifetime.

I would suggest that we again evaluate Koji, which is Fedora's solution. I haven't used it personally, so I don't know how suitable Koji would be.