BuildSystem questions

[Quentin Spencer]

Paul Wouters wrote:

>On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>
>  
>
>>If you have 2 packages (say A and B) and queue up first A and then B,
>>can you be sure that A will be finished and be available by the time B
>>is building? This doesn't seem to be the case currently, or there is a
>>window there when it's not true. So for packages with other packages
>>as dependencies should we wait until they have gone to the 'needsign'
>>area? Or longer? before building the package that depends on them?
>>    
>>
>
>My experience based on libotr/gaim-otr dependancies, is that you need
>to wait until they have been fully released before you can build.
>"needsign" is not enough. I am guessing the buildsystems take their
>rpms from a "real" mirror like any other system does. Hence my gaim-otr
>for fc4 being stuck for a week when libotr was built but in needsign
>limbo.
>  
>

I brought up this question recently, and I got the impression that there 
is an effort under way to fix this so you don't have to wait. The 
problem with waiting for a release before building the dependent package 
is that you can cause dependency breakages. I had this happen when I 
updated two packages at the same time, and the dependent package would 
not compile unless it had the newest version of the library, but the 
build system kept trying to build against the old library until the new 
one was released, which caused dependency breakage on the mirrors, which 
caused bug reports . . . Anyway, my point is, if this hasn't been fixed 
yet, it needs to be, because there are good reasons to be able to relase 
a complete set of packages at the same time.

-Quentin