I think that's an excellent reason to trust bugzilla! If you
sent
mail to a mailing list, and someone didn't have a chance to look
at the problem for 18 months, they'd have completely forgotten
that your report existed...
If a bug stays unfixed for 18 months then something must be seriously
wrong with the bug tracking/fixing process, whatever it is. Anyway,
fine... bugzillas shall be filed, since people are not happy with me
posting bugs on the "development" list. I will start by filing bugs for
libgnomeprint and fontconfig to make sure you don't forget about them :)
Speaking of which, it would be nice if bugzilla supported filing bugs
that relate to more than one component. That's one of the reasons
I prefer mail as the means of communication. Bugzilla's just a dumb
machine, and I much prefer to deal with a human that understands that
bugs are often related. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. And how can
I file a bug which does not relate to one of those components, but
something more general? (like the fact that fedora menus are a mess)
How can I file a bug whose component I do not know ... if something
broke in gnome, I know it's broken, and I have no idea which component
is responsible...
Based on my current (mostly upstream GTK+) workload, I don't
have
a lot of flexibility in that at the moment, but I think it is an
interesting policy question for Fedora in general - just how important
is keeping the set of RPMS always recompilable with the current
tree?
I'd like to know the answer too.
Pro:
- People seem to be rebuilding RPMS a lot; if something breaks,
bug reports appear very quickly.
- Makes mass rebuilds to check, say, compiler changes, easier
if everything builds all the time.
- Generally good hygiene
I am compiling for athlon, because I'd like to benefit from the speed
optimizations for my arch. I would appreciate if things compiled. Then
Fedora could easily provide an athlon set of rpms one day.
Con:
- It takes developer time that could profitably be used elsewhere
- Making everything fully bootstrappable involves significant
engineering ... e.g., fixing the freetype <=> XFree86 build
loop dependency would require rewriting the makefiles for
freetype-demos and getting the changes upstream. (*)
Right now, I tend to consider it a "would be nice" but not
a
"must"; but if it turns out to be an important goal for the Fedora
project than it probably needs to be enforced in the process,
say by not shipping betas until all packages pass a mass-rebuild.
Regards,
Owen
(*) Note that a bootstrap and mass-rebuild are different things:
bootstrap: Recompiling everything from the ground up;
clearly requires using at least a few packages from a previous
build or a cross-compiler.
mass rebuild: Rebuilding all packages, but just against the
current tree.