Compiling Fedora... athlon

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

> 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.