distro release and reproduceability

[Matt Domsch]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 09:39:28AM +0200, Farkas Levente wrote:
> Matt Domsch wrote:
> > Some projects such as openSUSE do throw a lot of compute resources at
> > the problem, rebuilding all dependent packages in the chain when a
> > lower-level package is rebuilt.  Fedora hasn't felt the need to go
> > quite this far.
> > 
> > Between the FTBFS build runs that I do, and the mass rebuilds that the
> > Release Engineering team did for Fedora 11, and those that Jacob has
> > done when major gcc changes are about ready, nearly all (but not
> > exactly all) packages can be rebuilt as expected.  The few (and it was
> > < 5% last time I looked, maybe significantly fewer even than that
> > after the F11 rebuilds) are quite problematic and mostly bit-rotten
> > code that people still have need for but upstream is stagnent.
> 
> that's the problem. currently there're 7486 package in rawhide which
> means 5% ~= 375 package which is rather large number. imho these package
> should have to removed or fixed. and to avoid it at least create a new
> automatic bugzilla entry for these packages.

I'd love to have 100% rebuilt and rebuildable, no question.  But there
are only so many hours in the day.

http://jkeating.fedorapeople.org/needed-f11-rebuilds.html
shows 189 packages as of 4/22 which were not rebuilt for F11, 2.5% of
the total.  So we've made great progress.  When I started doing my
FTBFS runs, it wasn't unusual for there to be nearly 1000 that
couldn't rebuild properly.  Having that down 80% is a huge win.

If you'd care to work with the maintainers on the remaining 189
packages, such that at the beginning of F12 development they're all
rebuildable, we'd welcome that help.

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux