fedora-devel not up-to-date with fedora-yarrow-updates? (please fix)

[Nalin Dahyabhai]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 11:29:00AM -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
> I'm sure this is a process thing. From a process perspective, this seems
> wrong. Shouldn't fedora-devel *always* see packages earlier or at the same
> time as fedora-yarrow-updates? People who only test against fedora-devel
> will not be testing the above packages.

I don't think so.  If we froze the development tree today and called it
FC2, we'd want the version sorting order to put FC2 versions higher than
any currently-available updates for FC1.

After we freeze FC2, it's possible for FC1 updates to be "newer" than
FC2, but the corresponding FC2 updates should be "newer" still.  If
there aren't FC2 updates (because FC2 doesn't have some problem), then
FC1 updates need to sort somewhere between FC1 and FC2 so that upgrading
from FC1 to FC2 still installs the version of the package which is in
FC2.  I'm almost certain that we've made mistakes in this in the past,
but that's my understanding of the rule.

> I want to help you all test the packages. Right now, I have to make
> sure I have the latest packages in both fedora-yarrow-updates *and*
> fedora-devel. This seems wrong.

The updates are updates for FC1.  The development tree is on track to be
FC2 when it gets frozen, and may include changes which make it binary-
incompatible with FC1.  (Python 2.3?  New Perl if they're not compatible
enough to share the same paths?)

Problems you find while testing an FC1 update on a development box are
either going to be bugs in the package, or incompatibilities with the
tree you have installed.  The results of your testing are only going to
be meaningful if you can distinguish between the two.  It may produce
valid results, but this is a caveat.

Cheers,

Nalin