Pushing partial builds to the mirrors

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:38:04 +0100, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> Is there a mechanism in FE that allows packagers to prevent packages
> resulting from a successful build to be pushed to the mirrors?
> 
> Case in point is audacious-plugins.
> This package provides a main package and several subpackages. Due to
> changed dependencies for a single subpackage I had to request a
> complete rebuild. This means that the main and all subpackages will
> be pushed to the mirrors, causing updates for all users, even though
> this release ought to be identical to the release before it, apart
> >from said subpackage.
> 
> I'd like to be able to tell the buildsys to push just the subpackage
> to the mirrors.

The very few times this has been done in the far past it only created
confusion. Like users noticing the new src.rpm, but missing the binaries.
foo-1.0-9.src.rpm is available, but only old foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm and
foo-debuginfo-1.0-1.i386.rpm are in the repo. Or unexpected changes of
inter-package dependencies, which turn up due to changes in the spec file,
in patches, and due to the rebuild and which break when the builds are not
published as a "complete set".

It also makes it harder to fetch the latest complete set of source rpms
and binary rpms, since for the mixed set of partial builds, multiple
source rpms are needed. Every binary rpm has a reference to its source
rpm in the package headers. (How do you tell automated rebuild checking
tools that the missing binaries for some src.rpms are intentional?)

It's best to avoid the confusion and the pitfalls. 

In your case, for instance, you modified the spec file in a way which
modifies the main package dependencies and contents. The new changelog
would not match the contents of the available binary packages.