Please rebuild your packages in the development tree of Fedora Extras

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:22:42 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> Do all packages need a rebuild?
> 
> Yes. 

No.

> Most noarch packages probably would work fine without a rebuild and
> won't have a benefit from the new gcc security features. But we know
> that some noarch package are broken due to changes in rawhide -- we'd
> like to catch and fix those. And we want to make sure that a package
> still has a active maintainer while at it. 

It's still short-sighted, since

1) A forced rebuild, just to check whether a package still builds, is
something that can be done by the maintainer _locally_ using mock or with
FC5 Test 3.

2) There are exceptions. Noarch packages which really don't need a rebuild.
Either it does or it doesn't. If it doesn't, the rebuild/update is not
needed.
 
> What happens with packages where no one stepped up to rebuild them?
> 
> Ehhh, we didn't talk about that to much yet. Maybe we'll file bugs after
> the rebuild flood goes back and ask the package-maintainer to rebuild
> his or her package(s). Or we simply rebuild them and ignore the
> maintainer -- but in that case we can't be sure that the maintainer is
> still active in Fedora Extras. 

We can't be sure of that anyway, because who checks whether more than
a rebuild would make sense? E.g. new upstream releases not been applied
prior to a rebuild done by the maintainer. We should rely a bit more on
the user community who helps with reporting packages which are out-of-date
or broken.
  
> What happens with the old packages build before February the 13th 2006?
> 
> They'll probably be removed from the repo before FE5 goes live.

Veto. Removing broken orphans can cause enough poor dep breakage already
during a Yum upgrade. So let's keep the number of removed packages low. Mind
you, a broken installed package is not excluded from a transaction check,
so anything that's installed already but missing in the repository is bad
(as it won't be upgraded with something working and will cause the upgrade
to fail). If you remove more than what is known to be broken, this increases
the risk of breaking even further, at least for some users.

We may remove what's broken and track it on the FC5Status page in the
Wiki just as we did for FE4 and older.