pushing updates for FTBFS

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 03:25:25PM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:06:09 -0700
> Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote:
> 
> > A bug was filed against meshlab because of an FTBFS for Fedora 14.  I 
> > added a patch to resolve it and submitted an update.  After seven
> > days with no feedback, I was able to push it to stable.
> 
> Were there reports of the existing build causing problems? 
> 
> Personally, I would check such changes in, but only push out an update
> in f14 if there were other changes that made it worthwhile, or the
> existing build caused issues. 
> 
> Rawhide of course you should build for for these issues. 
> 
> > For an FTBFS for a new Fedora release, does it really make sense to
> > have the seven day delay?  I don't see what the downside would be of
> > allowing it to be pushed to stable immediately.  Even if there's
> > something wrong with the update, it isn't going to replace a working
> > package.
> 
> I don't see the point of pushing it as an update at all, unless it's
> fixing some bad behavior in the existing build or there are other
> reasons (upstream update, etc). 
> 
For (unreleased) F14, I think that the arugment that future work on the
package is better off starting with something that works than to start off
with something that's broken by new gcc, boost, etc is very valid.

If I get a time-sensitive security bug about foo in Fedora 14, I want to
have as few extraneous issues as possible so I can hunt down and fix the bug
quickly.

In released Fedora's that argument starts to lose weight because the window
in which a bug that *must* be fixed could be discovered goes down (ie: F12
only has a few more months of life so there's a much smaller time period in
which a must-fix bug could be discovered.  (OTOH, fxing FTBFS in a just
released Fedora is probably still a good reason to update.)

-Toshio
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