How is it determined if a package needs to be rebuilt for a newer Fedora version?

[Richard Shaw]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Once upon a time, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> said:
>> I see regularly where new(er) users wonder why they see packages
>> installed with dist tags from previous versions of Fedora.
>>
>> I understand why this occurs but now that I've gotten into building
>> some of my own packages I started to wonder how it is determined if a
>> package needs to be rebuilt or not.
>>
>> Do we rely on the package maintainer to make a call or is there some
>> definitive way to test a package?
>
> This would be more appropriate on fedora-devel (any follow-up questions
> should go there).
>
> Basically, you rebuild a package when there is a good reason to rebuild
> it.  You've made packaging changes or you pulled in a new upstream
> version are the main reasons for a package maintainer to do it.
> Sometimes it'll get rebuilt (or you'll need to submit a rebuild) when
> dependencies change (such as a shared library soname bump).

I'm still a little green in this area. Do you mean that a version bump
in the library that is not backward compatible?


> Some Fedora releases will go through a "mass-rebuild", where every
> package gets rebuilt.  This is only done when there's a good distro-wide
> reason, such as RPM upgrades that change the package format or gcc
> upgrades that significantly affect optimization/code security/etc.

That's a good reason TO rebuild but...


> You should never rebuild just to see the release number and/or distro
> tag change.

I understand a lot of the "why's" (even more so now) but I'm still
unclear on the "how".

Thanks,
Richard