KDE vs. GNOME on F10

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:28 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:

> Care to write up a proposal on how this work-flow would look like?  Without
> some of the details, I'm confused how one would avoid all kinds of weirdness
> from repo conflicts if you have multiple of these repos enabled.  That, and the
> fact that everything is built from a single buildroot at the moment.

I probably couldn't do much justice to a comprehensive plan as I have
insufficient knowledge of how the buildsystem works. I was acting at a
higher level - just trying to point out that it's essentially doomed to
try and please everyone with a single update repository, that's not an
argument anyone can win. Either the 'we want stable updates' camp or the
'we want shiny new stuff' camp is going to be disappointed.

I'm not sure what kind of weirdness you mean, but I have to emphasize
this isn't some kind of theoretical system, it really exists in the
really real world :). I have three Mandriva machines (not worth the
bother converting them to Fedora), some using /backports and /updates
repositories, some just /updates, and there's no 'weirdness' involved.
Probably the major issue I can think of is that maintainers
pushing /backports packages should be careful to forward port changes
done on the /updates branch to /backports, so that those using the more
adventurous updates don't miss out on any security / bug fixes done in
the stabler updates. But since the person doing /backports packages and
the person doing /updates packages are usually exactly the same person,
this doesn't present much of a problem.

Oh, I just realized, in case it's not clear - in the MDV system, the
adventurous repo (/backports) is complementary to the stable repo
(/updates), it doesn't replace it. You either use /updates
and /backports, or just /updates; using /backports but not /updates is
not intended or supported.

Yes, there would have to be some kind of accommodation in the build bots
for this. Packages intended for the adventurous updates branch would
have to be built in an environment which used that repository *and* the
stable updates repository as a source, and packages intended for the
stable updates branch would have to be built in an environment which
only used the stable repository as a source. It's more work, yes, as I
said in my initial mail :)

The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want
to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks
back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe
the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable
update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and
it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous
updates to be sent there.

Of course, packages sent to /backports can break sometimes, but that's
not unexpected, and no different to shipping updates of the same level
of potential brokenness in a single update repository, as we currently
do.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net