Release Engineering Meeting Recap from Monday 16-APR-07

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 23.04.2007 11:34, Axel Thimm wrote:
> 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?

No, I simply stopped replying to the thread where you calculated the
number of packages that got rebuild since there was obviously a
disagreement between us two if the numbers are correct or not for
Extras. And it seemed to be just a discussion between us two anyway, so
I assumed it didn't make much sense to continue it and annoy everyone as
we both IMHO look like fools in the end.

But not replying doesn't mean that I agree with you, so no, we did not
"ban this as an urban legend".

> Can you otherwise show
> what savings FC6 -> F7 will give? [...]

I'd be simply glad if every package that doesn't need to be touched
doesn't get touched (downloads, risk of changes, rpmnewfiles,
rpmsavefiles, ...). Even if the number is low -- for example it are
currently 1/10 of the  package on the rawhide machine I'm currently using.

>> 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.

Seems we didn't understand each other what I was up to and you bring in
stuff that was never part of what I meant to do -- a disttag like ".2"
for example was never mentioned in my mails in the way you describe it
above and should not be needed for it (it can be used if we want to for
a specific reasons, but I didn't mention that to not make the stuff even
more complicated then it is already).

>>> 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 

/me wonders if something is missing here.

Anyway, if you don't do exciting and unusual stuff then the upgrade path
with my ".1" example is just the same as with ".fc7" as disttag.

>>> 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.

I did and explained in on fedora-maintainers. But seems you have
something different in mind then I have and outlined. My fault, as my
description probably wasn't good enough then. Anyway, it was just a idea
that came up in my mind that IMHO could solve the problem "fc(n)
disttags in fc(n+x)" if we choose to continue to not rebuild everything
each cycle.

Axel, let's stop arguing endlessly over detail here. Let's wait for
FESCo to look at the issue after F7 is out. Maybe it decides to do a
rebuild now each devel cycle in the future -- then the whole time
discussing over details of the ".1" as disttag idea would be wasted time.

CU
thl