use disttag ".1" for devel to avoid confusion (was: Re: Plan for tomorrow's (20070604) Release Engineering meeting)

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 18:10 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 11:27:18AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Monday 04 June 2007 11:20:47 Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > > The idea to use ".1" as disstag for devel (discusses weeks ago) still
> > > stands.
> > >
> > > The idea in short: x.1 is higher then x.fc7 and avoid the confusion if a
> > > package doesn't get rebuild during a devel cycle; and if there later is
> > > a update after releases x simply gets increased -- so there would no
> > > need to got for "x.2".
> > >
> > > I can outline the idea further if anybody is interested.
> > 
> > I'm really really against playing games with dist tags like this.  Just for 
> > the record.
> 
> And it's just replacing .fc8, .fc9 with .1, .2, not really
> helpful. Not to mention that it breaks all dotted releases.

FWIW, I'm pretty solidly against this as well.

I'm not against a pre-final-freeze, scheduled mass rebuild of devel. I
think that would solve the "omg, my disttags look old" fears and catch
some minor issues.

Is it redundant for some packages? Yep.
Does it hurt those packages to be rebuilt automagically once during the
cycle? No.
Does it help us catch broken packages before final freeze? Yes.
Does it help identify AWOL maintainers? Yes.
Does it catch subtle API breaks? Yes.
Does it provide a tree consistency waterline test? Yes. 
(e.g. I built my package in devel a long time ago, all the underlying
libs have changed, it doesn't build anymore, do we want to ship it like
that?)

Its not perfection, but I see the value in it, and the only downside is
builder cpu-cycles and disk space. It also solves the dist-tag mismatch
issue as a bonus.

~spot