Broken deps in the stable release are not acceptable

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at nurfuerspam.de
Fri Dec 28 18:19:35 UTC 2007


Raleigh, we have a problem...

python-gammu, which is required by wammu, prevents users from updating
to the latest gammu release for several days now. It has already been
reported in Bugzilla, see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=426848 and - even more
interesting -
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425831

This leads me to some questions:

     1. Why is # 425831 still in status "New"? It has been reported on
        Dec 16th and the maintainer already responded to it.
     2. What's so difficult to coordinate 2 (3 with wammu) dependent
        packages? All are owned by the same packager. IMO this should be
        done in one single update in bodhi.
     3. Do we need better training  for our maintainers or more
        documentation in the wiki? The broken deps already appeared in
        EPEL before they were in F8, so the maintainer should have known
        that he's breaking something when he did the gammu update in
        Fedora. 
     4. When was the testing done? gammu-1.17.0-1.fc8 was built on Dec.
        22 11:22:28 MST [1] and hit the updates repo on Dec. 23 22:50:08
        [2]. This is less than 36 hours for testing.
     5. Why has gammu been pushed directly to updates and not to
        updates-testing? According to the changelog it was not a
        security update.

Note that I don't want to blame a single person here. I think this is
just an example that we really NEED to think about how to avoid such
situations in the future? I know there are people on vacation these
days, but there are enough people that offered help. Unfortunately they
are not allowed to by the ACLs.

Any thoughts?
Christoph

[1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=28966
[2] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2007-4743





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