FAQ:Why to Use rMake
From rPath Wiki
| FAQ | ||
| Question: What are the advantages of using rMake over just building in my current build environment? | ||
Answer: By creating a pristine chroot environment for building, rMake ensures you know exactly what is installed when you build a package. Often, packages have optional dependencies that they turn on if they find the necessary libraries and otherwise silently disable. Such features mean that a build on one system might have different functionality and dependencies than a build on another system. rMake eliminates that uncertainty.
rMake also allows you to build packages when you do not have all of the necessary development libraries installed. This means that a relatively minimal installed machine can be used as a build system.
rMake manages dependencies for you. If you have two packages that you want to build, foo and bar, and bar needs the new foo installed to build, you can run rmake build foo bar, and rMake will understand to build foo before building bar, and it will use the new foo when building bar.
rMake allows you to test builds before you commit source changes without having to build twice. You can run rmake build foo.recipe and rmake will build the recipe. At the end of the build, if you want to commit it, rMake will commit both the binary and the source together, saving a step.