Summary - Broken dependencies in Fedora Extras - 2006-11-24

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:47:48 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> > Well, I think you misunderstood what Alain tried to point out. There are
> > packages in FE which are broken for a very long time. Meanwhile, FC3 and
> > FC4 have been transferred to Fedora Legacy, and since not even FESCO cares
> > about this, they remain broken.

> BTW, FESCo has to set priorities, too. The above problem (and all those
> packagers which have broken deps for quite some time) really annoys me a
> lot

Some packages are broken for two months or more. Some even belong to
FESCO members.

One thing for sure, I have not created the repoclosure report scripts to
become the grunt who enters all that breakage into bugzilla, just because
some FE packagers prefer to ignore the broken deps report and/or the
bi-weekly emails they receive.

One option that is left: running a different script on the repoclosure
reports and opening bugzilla tickets automatically. I can do that, I've
done it before, but I don't like to do that with my own bugzilla account
too often (I have enough open tickets like #216007). And I don't want to
be the one to maintain the growing list of tickets as quite often
packagers don't maintain their tickets themselves and apparently expect
reporters to verify the fix.

> (and they make the reports quite useless because they are so long
> that probably nobody reads them anymore) -- but I and FESCo can't do
> everything alone (FESCo members do their FESCo work in their spare time,
> too) and there are IMHO things on the FESCo todo-list that are more
> important currently.

FESCO consists of 13 members. Not even an official statement has been
made. It is questionable what FESCO's point of view is with regard to the
growing list of problems. I don't ask you, Thorsten, to fix the crap. I
just wonder where the steering is? FESCO should have the courage to
contact a FE Contributor officially and request action, stop a contributor
from adding further packages to FE prior to fixing published builds, or
requiring a packager to name a co-maintainer. It would also be interested
from a "steering" point of view, why packagers don't keep their packages
in a working shape.

> I'd really like it if someone that cares (in an
> ideal world: the QA-Sig) and has some spare cycles just would step up
> and fix all those stuff that easily fixable -- this policy allow that:
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Policy/WhoIsAllowedToModifyWhichPackages
>

This doesn't fit too well into your scheme, as it results in some
volunteers breaking stuff, other volunteers trying to fix the breakage.
When the community gets 

> The above problem is not easily fixable. My vote is to simply ship a
> update createrepo in Extras or ignore it for now as the dists are
> probably EOL soon.

Back when I was still in FESCO, we've removed the broken packages after a
long time of waiting for a fix in Core. We could do that again (and
e.g. only remove "plague" for FE3/FE4), but again as a last resort only.

> But the real solution is to prevent in the future
> that a package with broken deps ever hit the repo (that would afaics
> have prevented this particular problem) .

A theoretical and long-term solution which requires a lot of work and
testing, as else it opens the infamous queue that leads to a growing pile
of wreckage.