Release Engineering Meeting Recap from Monday 16-APR-07

[Axel Thimm]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 06:49:20AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 23.04.2007 05:56, Dave Jones wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 08:07:54AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >  
> >  > I would prefer a rebuild
> 
> Even with deltarpms it's IMHO to much risk and overhead (slower dist
> updates due to more packages needing updates; reassembling the rpms also
> takes time) for a small gain.

Didn't we already ban this as an urban legend? Can you otherwise show
what savings FC6 -> F7 will give? Unless you have a full install,
which is strongly discouraged and only possible with kickstart tricks,
it's is close to none already.

> IOW: Changing it to be just "fc" does not work. Changing it to ".1" or
> something else that is higher then "fc<number of latest release>" would
> work.

Changing to ".1" either means dropping disttags forever, or obscuring
disttags into integers, so people don't notice. As Rahul noticed, if
disttags were to be banned, what will happen with F8, F9 etc? Start
manually adjusting the releases to have proper upgrade paths? That
would be a giant step backwards, we already have disttags in 89% of
all packages with a steady increase of >10% per release for the last
three releases. I don't want to see giant lists of "EVR package
problems" returning.

The matter of having disttags like ".1", ".2", etc, has been discussed
at langths already several years ago and was proven to be quite buggy
and messing with the release tag more than you'd like. So that's not a
solution either.

> > The entire purpose of the dist tag is to discriminate between
> > two otherwise same version packages across two releases.

And to ensure proper upgrade paths, e.g. releated releases should have
disttags that 

> > Changing it to 'fc' serves no purpose at all.
> 
> Changing it to something like ".1" can get us rid of the confusion of
> disttag "fc6" in "Fedora 7"; see the thread starting at
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-April/msg00395.html
> 
> But yes, it's a kind of (dirty?) trick.

and useless and broken. Please do think this through for the long-term
implications your suggestion has.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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