Extras Rebuild?

Michael Schwendt bugs.michael at gmx.net
Sat May 21 17:36:44 UTC 2005


On Sat, 21 May 2005 09:30:37 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> Any news on when a mass rebuild of Extras packages might be expected?  I've
> just installed a new machine and found that some of the packages are
> straight imports from the FC3 tree (on x86_64).  Sooner is better than later
> so people can start looking at why these things are failing.

We need better organisation than arbitrary mass rebuilds. By now we should
be pretty much complete with regard to every package having an owner with
CVS access (except for a very few individuals, who are missing, and one or
two, who can't sign up yet).

For the last rebuild of ~400 packages on April 7th, the situation was
different. Pre-Extras, builds for specific archs, packagers waiting for
CVS access, FC4Test releases being out already, GCC 4 rebuilds happening
in Rawhide after the wait for the compiler being considered good enough;
many factors resulted in the Extras Development repository being
out-of-sync with either CVS or with the Extras-for-FC3 repository.

Nowadays, we need a roadmap. A schedule according to which packagers
prepare their Extras packages, so when FC4 is released, FE4 is available,
too, and doesn't make us look bad.

Bill Nottingham some days ago posted a list of Extras packages to
maintainers-list, which need a rebuild, because of version mismatches on
the three archs we build for. We should assume that package maintainers
have noticed that list.

In addition to that, the FE4Target tracker contains a list of broken
packages, which failed to rebuild for FC4 or which fail due to serious
defects. These are issues a mass rebuild is unlikely to fix. As some of us
have attached patches to some of the bugs, how long do we wait for a
reaction from the package owner?

Package owners can decide better whether to rebuild a package or whether
to apply upstream updates first. Either we do have package maintainers or
we don't.

Concerning GCC4, is there a specific release of the gcc package, after
which all packages in Extras should have been rebuilt [in order to
benefit from compiler fixes]?

> -Toshio
> 
> PS: Thought for FC5 -- Could we have automated rebuilds for Extras after
> each test release?  For community members to contribute to fixing packages we
> need to be able to generate lists of packages which are failing.  Since
> development means people are using eats-my-babies rawhide it would make more
> sense to have the development packages be auto-built so breakage can be
> discovered in the development stage.

We seriously need to develop a feeling for the dependencies of each of our
packages. As soon as the next Fedora Core Development starts and the FC-4
branch has been created, rebuilds from within FE "devel" could be
requested by the package maintainers.

Same as above here. We do need a roadmap and a development model. If
somebody depends on packages, which have not been rebuilt, does he wait or
does he request rebuilds himself or by contacting the package owner first?
Unattended mass rebuilding all (!) of Extras would give a false impression
of what is maintained and what is not. E.g. after the April 7th rebuild,
some packagers did version upgrades almost immediately. The point of
rebuilding the old package versions was what? Community contributors
spending time on fixing broken rebuild attempts for a FC test release is
wasted time if the package owner just waits and applies an upstream update
a few weeks later.

I consider mass rebuilds a bottom-up "brute force" approach to try fixing
something where no top-down approach is available. More helpful in my
opinion would be, at least, to try coming up with a roadmap for Fedora
Extras and then find out where we encounter any difficulties.

-- 
Fedora Core release Rawhide (Rawhide) - Linux 2.6.11-1.1323_FC4
loadavg: 1.01 1.02 1.07




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