XFree86 spec file for develoment snapshots ?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>Over time I've hit a few bugs in Rawhide XFree86 that must be fixed
>upstream (at least that's what the RH bugzilla entries said). And now
>that XFree86 maintainers have been gently convinced to provide regular
>source code snapshots they'd like me to test if they fix my problems.
>
>I'm a bit reluctant however to build an unpackaged XFree86 (blame
>previous encounters) so I'd really like to know if someone has a srpm or
>a spec file that works with the new XFree86 code drops (you know, like
>the experimental rpms mozilla.org used to provide).

I currently do not have a 4.3.99.x src.rpm, however I have been 
fairly slowly working on one for about a week.  I don't have a 
lot of time to devote to it for about 2-3 weeks, so while waiting 
for a build to compile and whatnot, I've been test building 
4.3.99.x on another machine and getting rid of patches one at a 
time that are no longer needed.  The bigger part of the work will 
be forward porting patches that are still needed, and isolating 
small pieces of patches that are mostly unneeded, but which a few 
bits are still needed.

>I've taken a peek at the rawhide spec file but I freely admit after
>seing patches numbered in the thousands my head began to whirl ;).
>Anyhow I feel this kind of packages has a place in future Fedora layout
>(in a bloody-unstable repository perhaps) - it could host things like
>2.5 kernel rpms, latest gnomehide, rhug, latest experimental moz and so
>on.

I'm not really sure that experimental XFree86 belongs in 
fedora.us myself.  XFree86 packaging and maintenance consumes a 
very large amount of time, and I'm not convinced that someone out 
there would be able to volunteer the necessary time to it that it 
would require.  I'd also be leary of gratuitous feature/fix 
patches getting applied without appropriate review, etc., however 
that may just be a bit of paranoia on my part.  ;o)

Seriously though, for all the effort that it would require, I 
don't think it is worth anyone wasting their time to attempt to 
turn the 4.3.0 packages into 4.3.99.x CVS.  They'd either be 
seriously cutting corners and producing shoddy packages, or 
they'd be doing a _lot_ of work - work that I've either already 
done privately, or work that I'm planning on doing over the next 
month or so.

Also, I don't really want people switching from 4.3.0 to 4.3.99.x
yet, as I want people using and testing the hell out of 4.3.0 as 
much as possible, so that Fedora Core 1 has as rock solid an
XFree86 release as possible.

The first week or so's worth of 4.3.99.x packages will likely 
have a lot of nasty flaws and gotchas, so they wont go into 
rawhide.  Instead, I will distribute them probably from an 
unannounced dir on p.r.c somewhere and get a handful of 10 or so 
people willing to guinea pig test the package, so I have time to 
fix the most nasty/obvious problems that arise before widening 
distribution of it.  Once it shapes up a bit, I'll distribute it 
in my normal testing/unstable directory there, which by the way 
now has yum support.  ;o)


>There's a lot of packaged stuff out there not dogfoodable enough for
>rawhide.

In this case, rawhide is the head of development for Fedora Core
1, so nothing new will be in rawhide that isn't going into FC1.  
Once rawhide opens up again after FC1 is released however I might
not put XFree86 CVS into rawhide for a while anyway, until I feel
very certain that 4.4.0 will be released in time for the next OS
release.  I want to make absolutely certain that 4.4.0 gets
released in a sane schedule before committing to it for FC2.  
David has posted the 4.4.0 schedule, but the only thing that I
consider guaranteed about his schedule is the Feature Freeze and
Code Freeze dates.  The actual release could be anywhere from a
month to 6 months later than his estimate, so I have to be
cautious.  4.3.0 came out 4 months or more later than his
estimate last time, and actually went officially gold late enough
in our cycle that I think I lost hair.  I wont take risks on 
upstream release dates in the future.  ;o)


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat