Re: Release criteria proposal: drop kickstart package criterion
On Mon, 2018-06-04 at 16:39 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi, folks!
We currently have a Final release criterion that reads as follows:
"A spin-kickstarts package which contains the exact kickstart files
used to build the release must be present in the release repository.
The included kickstarts must define the correct set of release
repositories.
Why?
This is considered part of Fedora's duty to be 'self-hosting': the
kickstarts used to produce the release images are a vital piece of
information required to duplicate that release, so they must be
preserved along with the release."
Lately this requirement has been fairly annoying in practice. Updating
the package prior to release does not appear to be in anyone's regular
schedule, so invariably what happens is shortly before the release
deadline I realize we haven't built a 'release' spin-kickstarts package
and have to file a blocker bug and ping people with the necessary
permissions (of which there are only a few) to build one in a tearing
hurry. Then we have to approve the blocker bug and push the updated
package through the freeze, all wasting time we could be spending on
more important fixes.
The benefit here is really fairly tiny, as well. It's arguable whether
anyone cares particularly whether a Fedora release, as a frozen
artifact, is 100% internally reproducible (and I'm not sure whether our
releases actually *are* reproducible in any case, these days, I'm not
at all sure we ship all the necessary metadata and so on for *every
single deliverable* within the distribution).
These days I'd suggest it should be quite acceptable to simply use git
tags for this purpose. It should be quite easy for rel-eng to adjust
the release scripts to create a tag in the fedora-kickstarts repo (and
why not fedora-comps too, while we're at it) for each 'candidate'
compose, named for the compose ID. That would make it very easy to
access the correct kickstarts for any Fedora candidate compose just by
a 'git checkout', with no need for the cumbersome work of getting the
package into the compose.
Naturally this would go along with updates to any relevant docs or wiki
pages, recommending to use the git repository instead of the RPM
packages, and explaining the tagging scheme. As for the package, we
could either keep it but not sweat about updating it for each release,
retire it entirely, or change it to contain only a text file pointing
to the git repository (or to the doc / wiki page that explains the git
repo location and tagging strategy).
Thoughts? Thanks!
So an update on this: as the response has generally been positive I'm
planning to go ahead with it, but I think we should make sure the repo
tagging thing is done *before* we remove the criterion. So I've filed
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/7568 for that. Once that's resolved I'll
go ahead with the criterion removal and docs updates.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net