Mass rebuilds

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Axel Thimm schrieb:
> On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 12:06:58PM -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Saturday 09 December 2006 11:55, Axel Thimm wrote:
>>> That would had been some packages too much (e.g. all non-python
>>> packages), but who really cares about bandwidth and rawhide.
>> Some?  There would have been a huge number of spurious rebuilds.
> So? Other than some CPU cycles wasted who would get hurt? 

Depends on how many packages we would use this scheme for. But I suspect
that in a lot of cases users that will update to the next stable release
(e.g. from FC6 to FC7 (or whatever it will be called) in this case)
won't like package updates just for the sake of rebuilding if they live
in regions where internet bandwidth is costly and/or slow. They will
probably prefer to only update those packages where it is really needed

Sure, we could find a middle ground somewhere (only those packages that
use dist get rebuild, dist stays optional) or something like that, but I
doubt that's worth the trouble.

Yes, we did a lot of mass-rebuilds in for the last releases, but I hope
we in the future now and then have a release that can be realized
without mass-rebuilds. And noarch packages where not forces to get rebuild.

> In fact
> frequent mass rebuilds would disclose bugs that have gone by
> unnoticed, e.g. when a package's direct or indirect build dependencies
> change and the maintainer missed to notice that it affects his package
> indeed.

Agreed, but we could simply build them to a scratch repo that never gets
pushed. Tata, we have a similar effect without disturbing users.

>[...]
> The point is: Keep the given man power of contributors to being
> creative, therefore automate as much a possible.

Agreed. Thus I think we should work towards something like this:

"If the maintainer of foo updates foo to a newer version with a
different API/ABI then he should request rebuilds of all packages that
this update might break."

He of course does not have to fix all the packages that break with the
new version. Fixing the package that got rebuild by foo's maintainer
remains the job of the packages maintainer. And this rule is of course
for devel only. Tool to use:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rebuild-scripts/bumpspecfile.py?root=fedora&view=markup

Opinions?

Cu
thl