Hello Fedora community,
The Christmas period is coming, and soon after the Fedora mass rebuild will come and may lead to the creation of a bunch of FTBFS bugzillas.
I'd like to share with you the availability of a tool that we started
to develop this year, which aims to help developers to assess the
impact a change in their component will have on other components that
depend on them.
I recently used it in order to prepare for the upcoming Autoconf 2.72 release, and with it uncovered about 84 build failures (out of 1197 packages depending on Autoconf) that would have been missed if I were following the "classical" workflow. This resulted in few bugs opened in corresponding components, and even upstream changes toward the Autoconf community, prior to the official 2.72 release.
In the past weeks, it has also been used to assess the impact of porting Fedora to Modern C (by Florian Weimer) which tested about 10k packages and for the make 4.4 update (from DJ Delorie), which tested about 9k dependencies against this new version to look for breakage.
Yet, the more users there will be, the more this tool will improve and be useful for the packagers.
This tool is called the mass prebuilder. I've written a blog post for Red Hat a while ago, which already contains a lot of details about it:
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/09/26/find-errors-packages-through-mass-builds
There is a COPR package available to ease installation:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/fberat/mass-prebuild/
And a detailed Howto available in the source README:
https://gitlab.com/fedora/packager-tools/mass-prebuild/-/blob/main/README.md
As of today, the tool provides most of the planned features, although it only uses COPR as a builder backend, whereas Koji is also planned on the long run (and likely others).
Since the tool is fairly new, it lacks manpages, may miss features you would expect and is likely to have bugs (even if we tried to limit them as much as possible).
Therefore, don't hesitate to open issues in the Gitlab repository if need be: https://gitlab.com/fedora/packager-tools/mass-prebuild/-/issues.
