Fwd: How to prevent uploads of broken packages

[Axel Liljencrantz]

Hi,

The evolution and gnome-panel packages for Fedora have had broken
dependencies causing them to be impossible to update for almost 3
months. This forces me to manually ignore them on every yum upgrade.
This is not the first time this has happened, but as far as I can
remember it is the first time this has been the case for such a common
package for such a long period of time. This is certainly no
catastrophe, and anyone using a community distribution will have to
live with a bit of manual intervention every once in a while. I accept
that and don't want to blame anybody. But this situation has gotten me
thinking about how the Fedora development process could be improved to
handle this sort of thing better without forcing more work on the
packagers.

The obvious answer would be to never allow a package to enter the
Fedora repository if it is impossible to install it due to missing
dependencies. Such a system would have to be able to consider multiple
packages in a single transaction, since it must be possible to upload
packages that interdepend on each other.

Would such a feature addition be considered?

BTW, I would be happy to help out writing such a script, but I would
need some pretty heavy amount of mentoring on the internals of the
Fedora build process in order to do so. In the end it would probably
take as much time to implement this function as explain enough about
the build system for me to be able to write the script.

--
Axel