It's that time of year again, although there seems to be an off-by-one bug
in the calendar system causing some inconsistency in the timing wrt last
year :P
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2009-November/042339.html
Anyway, before going to beta and starting the inevitable Fedora Feature
process, we'd like some extra preliminary testing to catch out any major
issues early on.
The alpha isn't supposed to eat your system alive or anything, but proceed
with appropriate cauting, backing up the rpmdb etc, as usual.
The draft release notes are at
http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0
and Fedora compatible SRPM(s) can be found at
http://laiskiainen.org/rpm/srpms/
In particular, I'm interested in feedback on the new, pluggable and
enhanced dependency extration system. Documentation is scarce at the
moment but some background and examples can be found here:
http://laiskiainen.org/blog/?p=35
Note that the current SRPM is missing gstreamer plugin, cups driver
and automatic "devel-symlink" dependency generation, on purpose: the
highly application-domain specific gstreamer + cups bits can now be fully
moved out of rpm to gstreamer-devel etc, eliminating the need for
embedding python inside /bin/sh scripts and such to avoid extra
dependencies. The devel-symlink generation will stay in rpm but will
probably change somewhat, it can be handled in a more generic fashion now.
Please report any oddities found, preferably to
rpm.org Trac
at
http://rpm.org/newticket or rpm-maint list (or here for fedora-specific
discussions/suggestions etc).
P.S. Pjones, before you ask ;) The much wanted ordering-only feature is
not in the alpha, but is likely to make it into beta. The patch itself is
fairly trivial and non-intrusive, we're just trying to figure sane spec
syntax for it (discussion ongoing on rpm-maint)
- Panu -