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

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 09/20/2011 04:16 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 04:13:27PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 09/20/2011 04:03 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> We're in the freeze for beta. It's not reasonable to push new sonames
> into the distribution at this point.

I disagree. A reasonable QA would strive to resolve the issues and apply 
the solution candidates others already have contributed.

That said, a reasonable QA would cherry-pick such "solution candidates" 
from *-testing and integrate them. Simply flooding maintainers "with 
complaint mails" about broken deps, maintainers believe to already have 
fixed doesn't help anybody. Neither the testers (who can't test because 
of these broken deps), nor the maintainers (who believe to have done 
everything possible), nor the users (who will end up with low-quality 
distros).

Ralf