RFC: Mass rebuild of Fedora Extras before FC5 and how to handle orphaned packges for FC5

Toshio Kuratomi toshio at tiki-lounge.com
Sun Jan 15 20:12:44 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 19:59 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> We probably will have to do a rebuild of all (most?) packages in Fedora
> Extras before FC5 is released. Why? Some reasons:
> 
> - Fedora Core 5 will ship with a new major version of gcc (4.1 in FC5
> versus FC4 with 4.0).
> - The new gcc has some enhanced security features that of course only
> work if applications are compiled with it

These concerns would indicate holding off on rebuilding until the gcc4
changes can finish landing.

> - The new gcc and the modular X.org might break the compile of some
> packages. Most things probably can be fixed easily if we do it now. If
> we wait longer it might happen that other changes occur that break the
> build in other fancy ways. That would complicate fixing a lot.
> - rebuilding packages might expose some bugs in gcc or modular X.org
> that can then maybe can be fixed before the release of FC5
> 
These would indicate rebuilding now so there's still time to fix things.

> But the most important reasons IMHO is: There are a lot of packages in
> the devel tree that were not rebuild for a long time. I'm inclined to
> say that the Extras Tree needs a quite bit of work before FC5 is
> released.
[snip]
> And what do we do with orphaned packages
> ( http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/OrphanedPackages ) ? Drop
> them now? Rebuild them and ship them if they build? Who fixes those that
> did not build? Or do we drop those until someone steps up to fix them? 
[snip]
> Note to myself (please remind me of it if I forget it): we should clean
> up the devel tree shortly before FC5 -- we only should have one version
> of each package in it. This way we get rid of all old files with "fc4"
> in the release, too. 
> 
I'd propose removing from the FC5 package repository any package built
before a certain date (which takes into account your first set of
requirements above).  That way there are no stale packages in the Extras
repository for FC5.  Maintainers who want to be prepared for possible
issues with their builds should begin submitting their packages now
(even if they'll have to be submitted later as well.)

I would like to see orphaned packages require a new maintainer in order
to be pushed to the FC5 repository.  Ville's posted blender bug shows
that pushing packages into current repositories without active
maintainers can lead to serious issues.

If we simply don't ship anything built before some date and we require
someone to request the rebuilds then we'll know someone was working on
the package in the recent past.  If we do an automated rebuild we're
helping to foster unmaintained packages.

If we think the build system is going to be swamped we could think about
assembling a second submission infrastructure to handle release time
(actually, though, it may make more sense to use the current
infrastructure for this and create a new one for higher priority,
security releases.  This would have benefits throughout the
distribution's life, not just at release time.)

> Who files bug reports for those packages that did not build and keeps
> bugzilla in shape? We need new tracker bugs for Fedora Extras 5 just as
> we had them for FE4:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=157183 (FE4Target)
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=157553 (FE4Target-x86_64)
> (was there one specific to FE4 and PPC? Can't remember)
> 
Do we need an "Extras Release Manager"?

-Toshio
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