Package EVR problems in Fedora 2007-10-31

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:10:00 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> E.g. atm 90% of all complaints currently are against FC-6 and F-8.
> Cause: Fc-6 automatically getting pushed, F-8 being in deep freeze.

Only querying bodhi can fix that, which points back to the beginning
of this thread.

But even before the final freeze of rawhide, the report has been full of
issues for many weeks. And it has been created after the rawhide report
and after seeing test-update announcements, but prior to pushing FE6.

> > Case 3) You refer to an already released pkg in F-7 and F-8, which is
> > reported as being broken in F-7 only. 
>
> Right, that's the case I am talking about.

I know. Still, cases 1+2 are typical causes of upgrade path issues,
such as mass-updates pushed to an old stable dist before checking
that the same version upgrade builds also for the newer dists.

> > Let's assume you prepare a
> > version upgrade as a test update for F-7, not testing the same code
> > for F-8 or devel. You try to cherry-pick your target audience by
> > releasing an exclusive test upgrade for an old(er) dist, neglecting to
> > test the same stuff for the newer dists. What is so wrong about
> > warning about the broken upgrade path? Especially when you learn
> > that the test update works for F-7, you need to bring F-8 and devel
> > on par with F-7 anyway.
> 
> You are presuming the cause for the bug to be inside of the package
> exposing the issue. In such cases propagating a fix to F-8 would be
> appropriate, but in many cases, this is not the case.

What does it matter? All that matters is _where_ you apply the fix.
If you need to bump EV instead of just R, you break the upgrade path
(and then you need to bump EV in the same way for all newer dists).
If you can work around a problem in dependencies, however, you can
restrict yourself to bumping just R (the least-significant portion of
it).

Much of this discussion is pure theory, a playground for a theoretical
(albeit valid but rare) use-case of updates-testing. So what? How
often does it happen that you need to bump EV in the way described
above?