Broken upgrade paths in FC+FE 2006-07-31

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 16:52:25 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:

> buildsys at fedoraproject.org wrote:
> > perl-String-CRC32: paul AT city-fan.org
> >   4: 0:1.4-1.fc4 (FE4)
> >   5: 0:1.4-1.FC5 (FC5-updates)
> >   6: 0:1.4-1.FC6.1 (FC6)
> 
> Shouldn't the email address attached to the report be the one for the 
> person that needs to do something to fix this (in this case, the 
> maintainer of the package for FC5-updates and FC6) rather than the 
> person that caused the breakage (i.e. me, maintainer for FE4 :-( )?

Even with a complete package database (which we could query on "package
owner(s) per package _per dist_", it would not be bullet-proof either and
would require additional logic in its implementation.

In above case:

  1.4-1.FC5 is lower than 1.4-1.fc4

Maybe the package was moved from Extras into Core, and the Core packager
chose an incompatible dist tag. The script cannot know that.

Compare with the following scenario:

  4: 0:1.4-2.fc4 (FE4)
  5: 0:1.4-1.fc5 (FC5-updates)
  6: 0:1.4-1.fc6 (FC6)

Who is to blame now? The FE4 package owner for releasing something that's
higher than FC5/FC6? Or the FC5/FC6 package owner for a missing update?

The script could only guess.

The script could report to all package owners involved. Anyway, we
cannot do much about it without a complete package database. Extracting
package owners from Core bugzilla (Components list) returns also some
mailing-lists.