fedora-devel-announce for ABI/API/soname breakage announcements

Alex Lancaster alexl at users.sourceforge.net
Fri Mar 6 12:01:39 UTC 2009


>>>>> "TL" == Thorsten Leemhuis  writes:

TL> On 05.03.2009 21:44, Jon Stanley wrote:
>> 
>> 57	Make stronger policy/guideline that ABI/API/soname breakage should
>> always be announced fedora-devel-announce (not f-d-l)

TL> Why not simply mail f-d-l as well as all the maintainers of packages
TL> that are affected (and not fedora-devel-announce!)? A simple command
TL> line script is able to do that in case MTA's like sendmail or postfix
TL> are properly configured. That script likely could write a comma
TL> separated list that people can cut-n-paste to Thunderbird, Kmail and
TL> other MUA's if needed.

TL> Reason: I for one slowly start to get annoyed by the slowly increasing
TL> traffic on fedora-devel-announce that clutters my inbox. Thus I
TL> started to consider to move mails from that list into some IMAP folder
TL> automatically, and that is exactly what we didn't want people to do
TL> when fedora-devel-announce was created. I think we said something like
TL> "less then 10 mails a month" back when we created it, but I could not
TL> find that on a quick google search :-/

In a quick check on the archives, there seems to an average of around
15-20 e-mails per month on fedora-devel-announce (f-d-a) in recent
months.  Some months it is lower.  I do not consider that high
traffic.

Regarding sending to maintainers of packages that are affected, I
agree that would also be a good idea, but it's often difficult to find
out exactly which packages are affected.  Yes, I know you can run
repoquery to find those packages in most cases, but:

1) most maintainers are unaware of, or do not use repoquery regularly
   (even though they probably should)

  To solve this, ideally we could perhaps create new aliases that
  maintainers could simply use to contact all downstream affected
  packages in one fell swoop, e.g.

  <packagename>-dependent-packages-owners at fedoraproject.org

  that would be populated by a list of e-mail addresses for owners of
  all dependent packages, which would be created by a repoquery run at
  initial package creation.  It would also have to be updated as some
  kind of cron job as potentially dependent packages are added or
  removed from the repository.

2) even if repoquery is run does not necessarily collect all affected
   packages.  In some cases these ABI changes have an effect beyond
   the immediate list of packages that repoquery will list.  e.g. an
   update of the mono stack may affect a large number of packages and
   overall distro integration beyond what can be expressed by package
   deps.

Since a creation of such a system in (1) is probably a ways off and
still doesn't necessarily solve (2), I still think mailing f-d-a makes
the most sense.  ABI/soname breakage are exactly the kind of thing
that it is worth bringing to attention to the greater Fedora
community, which is what f-d-a was intended to solve.

However, there should definitely be a few exceptions to the rule of
announcement if maintainer performing the breakage, either 1) owns all
the affected packages and is planning to rebuild them, or 2) is a
provenpackager/co-maintainer, or otherwise has access and who is
intending to rebuild all affected packages (e.g. xulrunner/firefox).
In those cases, a heads-up on f-d-l might be nice, but probably not
mandatory (although even in thoses cases there may be dependent
packages that the maintainer is not aware of).

Lastly, all replies to f-d-a are redirected to f-d-l, and f-d-a is
moderated, both of which should keep the list traffic to the currently
manageable level.

Alex




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