[Fedora-packaging] Statistics on usage of disttags in Fedora Core and Extras

[Christopher Stone]

On 4/9/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>
> Christopher Stone schrieb:
> > On 4/7/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> >> Christopher Stone schrieb:
> >>> On 4/6/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> >>>> I also plan to remove disttags from those of my packages that update
> >>>> seldom, as I think it's just utterly confusing if there are packages in
> >>>> FC7 that still have a disttag ".fc6" in it.
> >>> huh?  How is this even physically possible?
> >>> /me am confused.
> >> You mean "Packages in FC7 that have .fc6 as disttag"? Easy: That happens
> >> if a packages was never rebuild during a devel cycle. And that happens
> >> quite often:
> >
> > So in other words, when the release team branches devel to F7 they
> > don't do a rebuild on all packages like they should?
> >
> > This seems just a little dangerous to me.  All packages should be
> > rebuilt on branches.
>
> /me is nor sure if Christopher means the devel branch before or after
> branching for F7 (in this case).

Well, what makes most sense to me is to branch devel to F7.  Then do a
rebuild on all the packages in F7.  This should be done at the time
when you freeze stuff (that is only bug fixes go in).  This way
package maintainers can put big changes in devel and bug fixes in F7.

>
> >  I am really quite surprised that this is not
> > already done.  There are already automatic rebuilding scripts, why not
> > just kick off a shell script?
>
> Because some packagers dislike that? To avoid that users have to
> download new packages just because they were rebuild? There are probably
> more reasons that don't come to my mind yet.

Why would you have to download a new package?  You arent bumping the
release tag or changing the spec file at all.   All you are doing is
firing off a build of the current package in a new branch.
Maintainers have to cvs up -d when new branches take place anyway, so
I don't see the issue here.

>
> Anyway, that stuff in packaging in practice. fedora-devel or
> fedora-maintainers would thus be the better place to discuss this.
>
> > I would think that checking that a package actually builds before a
> > release would be somewhat important...
>
> There are Matt's rebuild efforts. They probably should be integrated
> into the Fedora infrastructure better. E.g. use the normal builders when
> they are idle to rebuild packages, check them and if the build fails of
> something is different then send a mail to the maintainer or
> automatically open a bug. Or something like that.

Indeed, this would be a good idea.  I hate searching through the
dozens of packages that don't build to try and find one that belongs
to me.  Much better to automate the process.

Thanks.