Core and Extras maintainers coordination

[Nathan Grennan]

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 13:35 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> Speed what up, exactly?  Here I return to your original note:
> 
> "Adding a dependency checking system to the build environment that
> contains both core and extras packages would help detect the problems, and
> help coordination. Realistically you can't just automatically rebuild the
> dependencies in all cases. Hence some delay will have to be added if core
> and extras are to stay in sync at all times. Giving the extras maintainers
> notification and time to rebuild, or request a rebuild before an update is
> released."
> 
> So what are you proposing, exactly?  Are you offering to put together the 
> depcheck code that you're alluding to here, and work with Dan and Seth to 
> get it integrated into the build system?

  Overall I am offering to do whatever I can, but I don't know the build
system inside out. If someone could provide a list of what they think it
would take, then I could review it to say what I would be able to do.
But below is my best guess based on what I do know.


  My understanding is that core and extras are two separate build
systems. I see the need for this to be built into both. It looks like
repoquery in yum-utils can do a good part of it. If the build box had
yum installed in a standard way then a "repoquery --whatrequires
package-that-was-just-rebuilt" would give them a list of packages to
review.

  The trickier part is finding the maintainer information. This can be
found via the changelog, but there can be multiple maintainers and hence
it can be unclear who you should talk to. The command "rpm -q
--changelog package | grep '^\*' | cut -f2 -d\< | cut -f1 -d\> | sort |
uniq" Will give you a list of everyone in the changelog who you could
notify. You could notify everyone, but that assumes that they are all
still working on it. On the flip side, if you only talk to one, it might
be the wrong one.

  The best way would be to have a set maintainer in the rpm. Packager
seems like a good place, but instead of listing the maintainer, on Core
packages it says Red Hat. The extras packages I looked at don't mention
a Packager. Hence it seems a new field called Maintainer might be in
order, as the right person to talk to about conflicts. Then maybe
something like repoquery could be used to get both the package names and
their maintainers. This could be called automatically at the end of the
build scripts.