Fedora 13 has been branched!!

[Kevin Kofler]

Christoph Wickert wrote:
> You are lucky. In the past people broke my package without further
> notice and I had to take care of fixing them. On the other hand there
> are maintainers, that announce changes in advance and ask me if I'm fine
> with them rebuilding my packages or if I want to take care of this
> myself. This is how it should be but only proven packagers will be able
> to do this.
> 
> Take KDE for example: Although the KDE SIG is doing a great job in
> avoiding breakdowns, I doubt that each and every maintainer of a QT or
> KDE app is always aware of the changes before they happen. If things
> still seem to be working in F-13 or rawhide, he might not even be aware
> of the custom tag.

In KDE SIG, for releases, we normally identify packages needing a rebuild 
ourselves and will just rebuild them and include them in our update set. 
(The branched F13 will also work like that, though I don't think we'll need 
to bump another KDE-related soname from now to the F13 release, we're 
tracking the stable 4.4.x branch now, even stuff like the kipi framework in 
kdegraphics with unstable ABI keeps it stable in release branches.) For 
Rawhide, we'll also rebuild stuff if the maintainer doesn't do it by 
himself, but usually we'll give the maintainer a chance to do it first.

We also announce the new versions and warn about the presence of buildroot 
overrides in devel-announce, as well as on our own mailing list and IRC 
chan. If people don't read even devel-announce, there's nothing we can do 
about that, we aren't telepathic. ;-) It also helps to be on #fedora-kde on 
IRC if you maintain KDE/Qt packages, but the important announcements go to 
devel-announce as well.

> Honestly, I don't recall automated updates of my packages except for the
> mass rebuilds from rel-eng. If the people that break things and/or
> requested the custom tag will take care of this, we are fine, bug FWIW
> it's not like this in rawhide. Let's see how it turns out in F-13.

I'll do what I can to fix broken dependencies (as I did in the past; I fixed 
all the remaining broken dependencies for the F12 release), but I hope I 
won't be the only one! I can probably fix all broken dependencies alone if 
there are at most a dozen, but not if there are a hundred!

> I think we still need to be able to treat F-13 different than in the
> released branches, at least before beta freeze. If we need to do things
> in rawhide first and only push these changes to F-13 afterwards, a
> feature with a tight schedule like Xfce 4.8 is lost. That's just what I
> said.

You can build the stuff in F13 right away, you'll just need rel-eng help 
with buildroot overrides.

        Kevin Kofler