Hello,
On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Adam Williamson
<adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Sat, 2017-01-14 at 19:35 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
wrote:
> You argue that the change should be mostly painless, but without
> providing any details: why not rebuild a 10 or 100 or 1000 packages
> in a mock root with pkgconf-pkg-config? Even if there are some minor
> hiccups, at least we'll be able to estimate the effort for the whole
> archive in the "Upgrade impact" section.
Yes! Exactly this.
In general, I think we really need to be moving away from the 'suck it
and see' approach to distribution development, where we essentially
decide that something sounds like a good idea, then go 'welp, let's see
what happens', throw it in Rawhide, and watch it explode into a million
tiny pieces, then spend the next month putting the pieces back
together again.
In general, this is something I agree with.
This is why we do extensive testing of pkgconf to make sure that
betting on pkgconf isn't really a "suck it and see" affair. We feel
very strong about ensuring that we do not break distributions, and
when we need to make changes that have higher risk of breakage, we
usually provide an LTS branch to use while we sort out a plan for
mitigating the breakage. This is what I believe responsible
maintenance of a critical toolchain component to be, and is the
maintenance strategy we have used for 5+ years of maintaining pkgconf
as a pkg-config frontend. In general, we take QA very seriously so
that distributions are confident in our releases.
Yes, we've done that before, and yes, we've muddled through.
But we
really can do it better these days. We do have better tools and
somewhat more capacity in our systems. There *are* tools for doing
large-scale test builds like this. We *can* even build images from the
test koji tag or whatever and run some automated tests on them, to see
if they work. (If you want to do that, please, come talk to the QA team
about it; we'll help make it happen;it isn't a super-smooth fully-
automated process yet, but we *can* do it, and if it starts becoming a
regular thing, that gives us and the releng team a great motivation to
*make* it a smooth fully-automated process). We have better choices
than "just do it and see what happens". I think it might be good for
folks involved in the Change review process to start asking questions
like "how are we going to see whether this works at all before we land
it in Rawhide mainline?" when reviewing Changes like this in future.
I can't really comment on this in regards to Fedora, but my
understanding was this was the submitter's first change like this, so
I suspect he just got a little ahead of himself. He has been in
#pkgconf on IRC all day setting up a mass test build to verify that
everything will be fine. If it were my change request, I would likely
have collected that data first, but at least he is trying :)
William