Highlighting totem-upnp issue and possible koji problem?

[Michael Wiktowy]

Hello,

In trying to report a bug about the totem-upnp package not working in
F15, I found that someone had already filed a bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=694507

In it, the reason for it not working was totem-upnp was an *empty*
package. I checked on koji and while the build of totem and it
subpackages were completed, the build process seemed to have disabled
the upnp plugin because of a problem PyGTK vs. pygobject issue and
built an empty package.

I can understand the whole build not being killed over an optional
plugin. However, should koji build an empty package? I would think
that koji should just not make that subpackage at all. Then at least
people will not be tricked into updating a working package to an empty
one should this slip though QA/testing ... which I am guessing this
particular package has.

Maybe even some indication that there was a successful build but with
some caveats listed on the package build page:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=242946

Are there other empty packages out there?

/Mike

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 17:48 -0300, Michael Wiktowy wrote:

>  I can understand the whole build not being killed over an optional
>  plugin. However, should koji build an empty package? I would think 
It rather depends on the spec file.

If you look at the spec, it has this:

%files upnp
%defattr(-, root, root,-)
#%{_libdir}/totem/plugins/coherence_upnp

so clearly the packager noticed this problem, because the file list for
upnp is now effectively empty, with that line commented out. So rpm and
koji have only done what the packager told them to. Thanks to git blame
(God, I love that tool) we can see that Bastien made this change on
2010-11-02, but the changelog just says "Fix up filelist", which is a
bit cryptic. So I don't see any tool fail here, just a change by the
maintainer which perhaps wasn't prominently enough described.

In case you don't know, rpm is pretty strict about package file lists,
in part so that maintainers don't miss this kind of thing happening:
exactly every file produced by a build has to be listed - i.e.
explicitly made a part of one of the packages produced by the build. The
build will fail if there is a file produced by the build which isn't
explicitly made part of a package, or if there is a file listed in one
of the packages which *isn't* produced by the build. So when the upnp
plugin stopped working, the package build would have started failing and
complaining that there was 'no such file
%{_libdir}/totem/plugins/coherence_upnp' , and until Bastien commented
out that line in the spec, the build wouldn't have worked. So there are
sufficient tool safeguards here to make sure that the packager must
_know_ the package is empty where it wasn't before, and accept that. 

You could say Bastien should have stopped the upnp package building at
all rather than making it empty, but then if he didn't make something
obsolete it, old versions would have stuck around and caused trouble,
and if he makes something obsolete it, then re-introducing it when it
actually works becomes more complex.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 14:19 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

>  You could say Bastien should have stopped the upnp package building
> at
>  all rather than making it empty, but then if he didn't make something
>  obsolete it, old versions would have stuck around and caused trouble,
>  and if he makes something obsolete it, then re-introducing it when it
>  actually works becomes more complex. 
One thing I forgot, btw - we can't disallow empty packages in general,
because an empty package is a perfectly allowable and sometimes useful
thing: an empty package with some dependencies is what we mean when we
talk about 'metapackages'. So if you have a suite of packages which are
generally installed and work together, you can create an empty package
with dependencies on all the packages that typically go together to make
up that suite, and the user can just do 'yum install foobar' and get all
the right packages to make the Foobar suite work as intended. The use of
metapackages is generally somewhat frowned on in Fedora in favour of
comps-based groups, but there are a few.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 14:19 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
> > You could say Bastien should have stopped the upnp package building at
> > all rather than making it empty, but then if he didn't make something
> > obsolete it, old versions would have stuck around and caused trouble,
> > and if he makes something obsolete it, then re-introducing it when it
> > actually works becomes more complex.
>
>  One thing I forgot, btw - we can't disallow empty packages in general,
>  because an empty package is a perfectly allowable and sometimes useful
>  thing: an empty package with some dependencies is what we mean when we
>  talk about 'metapackages'. So if you have a suite of packages which are
>  generally installed and work together, you can create an empty package
>  with dependencies on all the packages that typically go together to make
>  up that suite, and the user can just do 'yum install foobar' and get all
>  the right packages to make the Foobar suite work as intended. The use of
>  metapackages is generally somewhat frowned on in Fedora in favour of
>  comps-based groups, but there are a few. 
Thank you for the clarification.

Poking around the Internets led me to believe that the totem-upnp
plugin and coherence is dead.

However, there is work is under way to make a totem grilo plugin that
switches the upnp framework to Rygel.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628648

I'll keep my eyes open and hope that plugin makes it into F15 soon.

/Mike

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 13:08 -0300, Michael Wiktowy wrote:

>  Thank you for the clarification.
>  
>  Poking around the Internets led me to believe that the totem-upnp
>  plugin and coherence is dead. 
If that's the case it should probably be dropped and properly obsoleted
rather than being shipped as an empty package, but I wouldn't want to
run ahead of Bastien on this one. He's the totem lead developer as well
as the Fedora maintainer, so he probably knows what's going on =)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Andreas Tunek]

On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 11:03 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 13:08 -0300, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
>  
>  > Thank you for the clarification.
>  > 
>  > Poking around the Internets led me to believe that the totem-upnp
>  > plugin and coherence is dead.
>  
>  If that's the case it should probably be dropped and properly obsoleted
>  rather than being shipped as an empty package, but I wouldn't want to
>  run ahead of Bastien on this one. He's the totem lead developer as well
>  as the Fedora maintainer, so he probably knows what's going on =)
>  -- 
>  Adam Williamson
>  Fedora QA Community Monkey
>  IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
>  http://www.happyassassin.net
>   

Aha, so that is why nothing happened when I tried to install the upnp
plugin! No need to file bug now I guess :)

/Andreas Tunek

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  If that's the case it should probably be dropped and properly
> obsoleted
>  rather than being shipped as an empty package, but I wouldn't want to
>  run ahead of Bastien on this one. He's the totem lead developer as well
>  as the Fedora maintainer, so he probably knows what's going on =) 
Bastien Nocera is the one working with upstream to get something out
the door in that gnome bug that I quoted so, while the workings are
not transparent, they are turning.

I just wanted to pass on what I discovered to tie together the lack of
totem-upnp with the birth of a new grilo plugin for people who are
wondering why their plugin doesn't show up in the list after
installing the package manually (like me).

/Mike