[fedora-arm] Fedora 15 ARM hardfp Virtual FAD (Fedora Activity Day) - FRIDAY

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 11:45:33PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:

> 	* Fedora should (IMO) institute mandatory mass rebuilds. Either every
> cycle, or every other cycle. I've briefly discussed with Dennis.
> Bootstrapping (and similar activities) are far easier with a clean set
> of deps, which is the case for F15. It should always be the case that we
> know everything builds and self-hosts through a mass rebuild per cycle.

This has been raised with FESCO in the past, and I don't think there's 
any fudnamental disagreement on it. But scheduling one mass rebuild per 
cycle doesn't prevent us ending up in a broken state unless we do it 
right at the end of the cycle, and right now that's problematic in terms 
of release process - rebuilding everything we've just QAed is an 
excellent way to introduce subtle breakage. So it really needs to be an 
out-of-archive verification rather than one that's targetted at the 
release, and we need the resources and manpower to handle it.

> 	* Fedora would benefit from an explicit position on the dependency
> explosion we're seeing in basic packages. Without going off too far into
> my personal opinions on a need to respect UNIX heritage, etc. I will say
> that the explosion of requirements is going to be a problem for any
> future efforts and will get worse without guidance.

My personal opinion is that bootstrapping is an intrinsically difficult 
and time consuming exercise. I'm enthusiastic about changes that make it 
easier, but not if they come at the cost of providing features that 
maintainers want to provide. It's rare for us to need to start an 
architecture from scratch, and I think optimising for rare cases is 
misguided.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org