[Fedora-packaging] Re: Full repo rebuilds

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Tue Apr 10 06:55:47 UTC 2007


On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 06:53:05AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 09.04.2007 22:57, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 08:49:48PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >> Le lundi 09 avril 2007 à 13:18 -0400, Jesse Keating a écrit :
> >>> On Monday 09 April 2007 13:13:25 Christopher Stone wrote:
> >>>> Checking to see if a package still builds correctly is more important
> >>>> than a little extra processing time during upgrades.  I'm pretty sure
> >>>> people expect full upgrades to take a bit of time.
> >>>> Just my opinoin.
> >>> What you fail to realize is that you can accomplish checking to see if things 
> >>> build correctly without making those builds go to everybody in the universe 
> >>> as an update.  These things are not tied together.
> >> But you can't accomplish checking the maintainer did check the package
> >> builds and works with the rest of a release if you allow old release
> >> packages
> >> Sorry, but "it builds" is not a good check. Especially if no human ever
> >> runs the result
> > I agree with Nicolas, at least one test release should be used to
> > rebuild everything in rawhide and have thus the result tested.
> 
> I kind of agree with you two that testing the freshly build packages
> would be best. But *I* think not rebuilding everything when there is no
> need to is more important, because
> 
> - the existing packages are out in the wild and we know that those work well

I've seen this argument twice now and I think it's both faulty and
dangerous: How can you consider packages to be "stable" when there is
fear that simply rebuilding them in a different environment will break
them, especially when this environment is the one the release is
defined with?

These are exactly the fragile packages we're after and don't want to
wave into the release w/o a fix. Currently we're running into the
release with closed eyes.

> - we seem to have users in countries were internet bandwidth seems to be
> costly and unreliable. We make it a lot easier for those people if we
> don't force them to download and update new packages that were rebuild
> without real improvements

Check out what the real space consumers are, openoffice, glibc and
kernels - these always get rebuilt per release. The next rows with
libstdc++, kdebase or the Mozilla projects do so as well. As a matter
of fact if counted in size almost everything on the CD/DVD spins in
the test releases has been rebuilt.

So there is no real win here.

> The compromise that IMHO should makes both sides happy: we have
> mass-rebuilds quite often anyway (probably every two or three releases
> due to toolchain changes; e.g. once a year).

No, that's not the truth, we had them for every release until now,
only F7 got skipped. Check the repo if you can't remember.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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