use disttag ".1" for devel to avoid confusion (was: Re: Plan for tomorrow's (20070604) Release Engineering meeting)

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 19:45 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:14:51 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 
> > I'm not against a pre-final-freeze, scheduled mass rebuild of devel. I
> > think that would solve the "omg, my disttags look old" fears and catch
> > some minor issues.
> >
> > Is it redundant for some packages? Yep.
> > Does it hurt those packages to be rebuilt automagically once during the
> > cycle? No.
> > Does it help us catch broken packages before final freeze? Yes.
> 
> Does it bear the risk of producing new breakage? Yes.
> (for lots of packages, features are dropped silently when
> configure tests fail)

These are things that need to be fixed. We can either find out that
they're broken or just hide from them. By having this on a set schedule,
then asking maintainers (and QA) to test the mass-rebuild resulting
packages, we'll find these things and fix them.

> An automatic mass-rebuild does not involve the maintainers at all.

No, but really broken packages help identify AWOL maintainers.
Admittedly, the lucky AWOL maintainers whose packages keep building as
is forever and ever will not be caught by this.

> It would be different if the maintainers were asked to update/rebuild
> their packages prior to a deadline. Only that would request a sign of
> life.

I thought about this, but it wouldn't ensure proper ordering between
packages. Packager A rebuilds after Package B is done, but changes to
Package A affect Package B's build.

~spot