Plan for tomorrow's (20070604) Release Engineering meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:59:23 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

>    Unfortunately this cycle we haven't done a mass rebuild, but

It's not unfortunate. It's great that packages, which work in FC6, don't
need a rebuild and continue to work in F7. For several binaries the
opposite is true, and you can install fc7 packages also for fc6. I don't
like superfluous rebuilds or rebuilds which result in cosmetic changes
only, such as an updated dist tag. For every rebuild there ought to be a
good reason and a visible and worthwhile goal for the package, plus a
packager who verifies the build results.

There are problems in some packages, which are not fixed by automatic
rebuilds and which are not found by automatic rebuilds either. Instead
of a mass-rebuild I'd prefer a roadmap, so that after some clear and
strict freeze there won't be any unexpected modifications anymore, such
as API/ABI breaks. Planning-safety for packagers to know till when to
prepare their packages.

All the testing with rawhide and test releases is void when we test
static packages, which are rebuilt automatically just for fun, and
shortly after the final release of the distribution, packagers get
active and push major version upgrades and stuff that breaks
dependencies.