Release Engineering Meeting Recap from Monday 16-APR-07

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 06:58:52AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

 > >   1. In the future we should consider a mass rebuild of all packages 
 > > around, but no later than test2
 > 
 > Hmmm, this was discussed in depth at the end of this thread:
 > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2007-April/msg00017.html
 > Some people would like to see a mass rebuild, some others are against it.
 > 
 > I'm one of those against it. Reasons:
 > - Seems we have quite some users in country were internet bandwidth is 
 > unreliable and costly. If we mass-rebuild everything each time those 
 > users have to download a lot of new stuff where nothing changed besides 
 > the release. that makes Fedora harder to use for them.

And these users are running rawhide ?

 > - the update process gets much longer for each and everyone of us if 
 > each package has to be downloaded and updated.
 > - the packages out in the wild are tested and known to work. Rebuild 
 > packages have to proof again that everything is fine (which should be 
 > the case most of the time, but in rare cases isn't)
 > 
 > IOW: The benefits of a mass rebuild *each* devel cycle is IMHO not worth 
 > the trouble we create for our users. I think a mass rebuild now and then 
 > when the toolchain (things like gcc or other crucial stuff like rpm, 
 > python,...) changed massively (round about probably every second or 
 > third release cycle) is more then enough.

Yeah, I'll agree with that.
Off the top of my head, I can come up with three scenarios where
rebuilds make sense.

- Considerable bugfixes which fix up bad code generation.
- new/enhanced features (such as more FORTIFY_SOURCE improvements)
- new optimisations
  (We could even narrow the scope on this one to rebuild just
   packages that would show a notable difference.  Ie, don't
   bother rebuilding fileutils, but do rebuild say, bzip2).

Taking a look at the packages in my f7 mirror, I spot 52 packages
that still have a .fc6 tag, none of which look particularly
"omg, we have to rebuild this".  There are also 713 with no %{dist} tag
which include some which we definitly have rebuilt, so it's harder
to figure out which of those got updated and which didn't.

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk