Responsibility for rebuilding dependent components, was: F-16 Branched report: 20110920 changes

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 09/20/2011 04:03 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On 9/20/11 9:19 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
>>> Currently
>>> I only see mails of maintainers who plan updating the library, but the
>>> rest of it pretty much depends on the maintainers of the depending
>>> components rebuilding them quickly enough, and the original maintainer
>>> to include them in the F-16 branched update.
>>>
>>> I'd like to see a discussion about how we can ensure -- within
>>> reasonable limits -- that e.g. bumping a library's SONAME is followed by
>>> dependent components being rebuilt and included with the providing
>>> component in one update.
>>
>> I'd like to see a discussion on the proceedures currently being applied
>> by QA, esp. "during freezes". IMO, they are unsuitable and harmful.
>
> I'd like to see a rationale for jamming a soname-changing update into
> the OS so close to a release.
Maintainers on vacation, non-trivial changes?

In my case, a major change was introduced into rawhide many weeks ago, 
which had caused breakage in rawhide. One maintainer being involved was 
in vacation, another one was non-responsive.

Ca. 4 weeks later the issues were resolved in rawhide and we started to 
propagate these changes to f16 and where caught by the delay queues.

>  In the absence of a very good motivation,
> that's not good engineering practice, and it's not consistent with the
> feature process.
>
> Perhaps you're not clear on what the word "freeze" means.

Perhaps you're not clear on what the word defective procedures means?

This socalled QA now is testing non-installable rsp. obsolete packages.

Ralf