Fedora 11 Mass Rebuilds

[Mike Bonnet]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Tom Lane wrote:
> 
>> Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> writes:
>>> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 16:32 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>>>> Can you say what it is?  I'm seeing this on my centos 5.2 mock host.
>>
>>> The rpm version on the host has to be able to support the larger file
>>> checksums.  We have a special rpm built for our EL5 builders that
>>> provides this.  I don't know if that rpm build is hosted anywhere out in
>>> the open, I do believe Mitr built it for us.
>>
>> It's going to be quite a large problem if people can no longer use mock
>> on an older system to test rawhide builds.  What is the plan to address
>> this?
> 
> The strong file hashes are just the first messenger that got through,
> and the message it brings is that it's time for people to wake up from
> the sleep of last hundred, err, ten years and realize that rpm can and
> does change. And yes it means older rpm versions can't always install
> packages built by a newer rpm.

In the future can we make it policy that before any new,
non-backwards-compatible rpm features are turned on in the build system,
that all actively-supported distros have an rpm that supports those
features available in the stable repos for a reasonable period of time?
 Not being able to install packages coming out of Koji has a very
negative effect on development, testing, package review, etc.  We also
want to avoid the situation of people running actively-supported distros
being permanently locked-out of the ability to update or upgrade, if for
example the rpm in the repos was built using a feature that the previous
version of rpm did not support.

rpm is a critical (maybe *the* critical) piece of our
installation/upgrade infrastructure, we need to be more careful with
compatibility.