On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 05:31:09PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:

> It doesn't just benefit bootstrap either. Take (random example) the
> recent CFLAGS change in redhat-rpm-config. What should happen at that
> point is that every package is automatically rebuilt. Should it cause a
> problem? No. But having packages randomly fail to build later because of
> some change made months or even years earlier is something to fix.

That change was made based on the assumption that there'll be a mass
rebuild in the F16 timescale. It's not practical for us to insist on
mass rebuilds every time we make an individual change, especially since
in this case we'd have had to do it again once it's moved to ldflags
rather than cflags.

It's certainly true that we could do more to identify ftbfs situations
earlier, but we've had mass rebuilds in most recent releases. Random
failures years down the line really aren't a realistic concern.

I actually disagree. I've been working on rebuilding F-14 for the current softfp arm platform that doesn't need to be boot strapped. The amount of packages in Fedora 14 that don't compile on the main intel platform even if I do a plain vanilla F-14 install with no updates (ie it was broken on release and wasn't any better with any of the updates). There wasn't a mass rebuild for F-14, just for perl and python dependencies.

Even with the F-15 mass rebuild I've found a number of packages that their owners never bothered to fix the FTBFS that was a result of the F-15 mass rebuild that have caused me problems that I've had to fix because the owner of the package never bothered to fix the FTBFS.

Peter