Disttags are nice, save the disttags

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 11:51:26AM -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> >Let's revert the question: "Why is it better without a disttag, out of
> >curiosity?". There is definitely a gain with a disttag, one can argue
> >how big it is, but what are the drawbacks? That some packages give
> >away their age? I see that as a feature, not a bug: "Hey, bridge-utils
> >is broken on F7. Hm, it has an fc6 marker. OK, it was built on FC6's
> >kernel-headers from 2.6.18, no wonder it doesn't know anything about
> >2.6.21"
> 
> I honestly don't care one way either way about the disttag.  I use it, 
> but I never had the pain that other people had, and I've had to deal 
> with packaging all the way back to RHEL2.
> 
> But one of the arguments being made is that rebuilds should be done to 
> avoid old disttags in newer releases.  I think that's silly.

I completely agree, this is more than silly. Never rebuild just for
the disttag's sake, noone here advocates this (I hope), at least I
don't.

> If there's a package that doesn't need a rebuild, it doesn't need a
> rebuild.  Enforcing once due to disttags is a dumb idea, IMO[1].  If
> people are going to enforce the "if your package has a disttag, it
> must get rebuilt" rule, I'd just start using less disttags.

The discussion about disttags and mass-rebuilds need to be
orthogonal. Disttags are a mean to an ends, not the other way
around. If both are decided to be used they *can* be combined, but
that's another story.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/attachments/20070605/86b5f121/attachment.sig>