Disttags are nice, save the disttags

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 05 June 2007 07:19:26 Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> Right. That's the problem that needs solving, not a reason for not
> doing full rebuilds.
>
> > This is just one example where automated rebuild, while it does some
> > good, doesn't really fix all the problems you think it would.  It just
> > hides them further under the rug under the assumption "But we did a full
> > rebuild, everything should just build fine now..." when in reality your
> > full rebuild didn't accomplish that, it just gave you a warm and (false)
> > fuzzy feeling.
>
> Isn't the warm fuzzy feeling warranted if the above issue is solved
> reproducibly ?

You only solve at the point in which you do the rebuild.  Doing such rebuilds 
really invalidates any QA done on the binaries up to that point, so you'd 
need to do it early, but then more changes happen throughout the release so 
you can't really feel warm and fuzzy at the end of the release that your 
rebuilds at the beginning of the release are still valid anymore.  So unless 
we do rebuilds again at the end and introduce a long period of testing where 
no other builds but bugfixes (but even that changes things!!) are accepted 
you don't get your desired results.  And then we have 1 or 2 month old builds 
in our release and we get trounced in the media for shipping old software, 
and people loose interest in fixing the release if we open rawhide during 
that re-testing period, and if we don't we get very upset maintainers who 
don't have anything to do...

Seriously the only time rebuilds are really worth it is when you're rebuilding 
for a specific reason such as a gcc or rpm change.  Then you ensure what 
you're rebuilding for is already in the buildroot, and you build things that 
A) make use of it, and B) haven't already been built.  And you do these 
things before the Feature freeze.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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