libXaw and you, and your family.

[Mike A. Harris]

Über-recently, libXaw broke.  This caused apps that build against
libXaw to fail to compile with error messages that were less than
helpful in determining the cause of the problem.  Additionally,
upgrading libXaw would fail as apps that required it would complain
about needing libXaw.so.6 or libXaw.so.7 on upgrades.

Several bugs have been filed about these problems, and the issue
is now resolved in the latest rawhide libXaw package.  If you
experience _any_ libXaw related issues, upgrade _all_ packages
to the latest rawhide.

Package maintainers:  You may or may not have to recompile your
packages against the fixed libXaw package.  Please test your
applications and if any problems are discovered, rebuild them and
test again.  Don't report libXaw bugs before testing with the
latest builds.

Full stop.

Details for the inquisitive:

The change from the Red Hat "beehive" buildsystem, to the new
mock based "brew" buildsystem has changed a number of assumptions
about how packages get built, and what is expected.  Previously,
our beehive system had pretty fully loaded buildroots, which
one could rely intentionally, or coincidentally on to provide
various dependencies.  As a result, many packages did not list
the complete set of BuildRequires they needed to successfully
compile properly.

With the new mock based "brew" system, as many/most of you are
aware, only a very minimal set of default packages are present
in the buildroot, plus whatever dependencies the package
specifies and their indirect deps.  For the last few weeks
people have been reporting build failures with mock to help
to get all Fedora packages fixed to specify all of their
needed deps.  Most of these are trivial (if not tedious) fixes,
but there have been a few zingers as well.

The libXaw problem was annoying as hell, but Bill Nottingham
tracked it down to a missing dependency on "ed", which has
now been added to the latest package.

Grr.  Ah well, it's fixed now.  People can stop nagging me in
email and IRC about it now.  ;o)



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.