missing dependency python(abi) = 2.5 for package: ...

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 12:18:03 -0500,
  glenn <gsimpson at mountaincable.net> wrote:
> Agreed, F11 development is not ready for anything yet.

That's a bit strong. I wouldn't recommend trying to do normal work on it,
but trying it to test particular things is doable.

> I have been trying to run F11 development updates, but with little  
> success.  I vary from 300 to abt 350 pkgs that are waiting for  
> dependencies.  The python abi=2.5 is a prime example.

That is a bit of a special case. A lot of things depend on the perl abi
so there are a lot of packages that need to be updated. It is more
typical for only a few packages to be blocked in this manner when
there are problems.
There aren't that many blocking packages left and if you do some work
you can work around the problem to get the update to succeed.

> I think development in Fedora has changed in personality.  IMO it used  
> to be you reported problems (ex: with dependencies) and in a few days,  
> updates would come along to address the issue.  Now everything is driven  

I think that is still the case. The issue here was the number of packages
effected.

> by some God awful complex script (so many things are being supportted).  

What script are you referring to?

> That has changed the output to often a 100 or more pkgs in a day.  The  
> pkgs are all over the map so I doubt it is possible to support with  
> manual methods.

Lots of packages being changed is a good sign. That means development
is getting done and things are getting pushed out quickly so that there
is less latency in feedback for changes.

> The problem, I think is, they are focused on script issues. Things like  
> the python abi=2.5 has been a known problem for over a month now.

And things are mostly fixed. If you want to do an update, you need to
manually downgrade a few packages and uninstall a few more. I have lots
of packages installed (5849 on f10) and was able to get the upgrade to
work without doing a huge amount of work. More typical installes may
need to only deal with a handful of packages instead of a couple dozen.

> I also think things are not managed very well.  The active development  
> is using koji as a site.  Those verbally complaining abt something not  
> working as expected, have often been pointed to koji and advise that the  
> problem had been fixed there, but hasn't made it to distro.

Stuff in koji for rawhide usually appears in the next rawhide push (which
happens daily). It doesn't get faster than that. For stable branches it may
not get pushed to testing because the developer doesn't think it is safe
for general testing and update/testing pushes often don't happen every day.
However, having koji available is much better than having a developer having
their own private branch somewhere as it allows you to do some testing
when needed, on stuff that isn't safe to hand out to everyone.

> It seems to me that people like me should be screeming every few days  
> that items like python have not been fixed in *weeks*, but I think  
> people have left it up to Fedora mgmt to recognize the issue.

You could open bugs against packages that have broken dependencies if
you think the maintainer hasn't noticed.