broken deps at beginning of rawhide report?

Alex Lancaster alexl at users.sourceforge.net
Sun Mar 2 10:53:52 UTC 2008


I wonder if the formatting of the rawhide reports could be altered
slightly to show the broken deps *first* before the list of new and
updated packages?  This way the current state of the brokenness (or
otherwise) of rawhide is more obvious to all maintainers, currently
you have to scroll to the end of the report to see it.

I'm aware that individual maintainers get separate nagmail whenever
they have a broken package in the rawhide repo, but the reverse is not
necessarily true.  That is, a maintainer that updates a package that
breaks a downstream dependent package isn't necessarily aware of the
extent of the breakage caused.  Having the broken deps up-front would
hopefully work somewhat against that tendency.

It would also allow at-a-glance the general state of rawhide and
hopefully motivate maintainers to think about the distro as a whole
and keep the list of broken deps as short as possible.  (Maybe also
include a diff on whether the length of deps has increased or
decreased since the last rawhide?)  I'm aware that sometimes there is
a large (but transient) breakage across the distro, but also there
appear to be packages that have persisted for several weeks without
being fixed and seeing the same broken package week after week in the
report might motivate others to fix it (I know it has for me in the
past).

Getting the broken deps list shortened is especially necessary given
the upcoming alpha freeze.

Alex




More information about the devel mailing list