Managing the GNOME updates in Fedora

[Richard Hughes]

At the moment the GNOME updates in Fedora are a bit of chaotic affair.
They mostly work, but only because of people like mclasen who spend
hours and hours building packages and putting everything together
manually. For 3.3.92 I experimented doing a mega-update and trying to
get all the 3.3.92 builds in one place, and working with kalev on a
google spreadsheet to make sure everything was built in good time, and
nothing was left behind.

For the GNOME 3.4.0 release, I'm asking people to copy this pattern,
and try to get all the builds into *one* update rather than 90% of the
builds in one mega-update and then 10% in random updates that other
people have filed. If this works, I'm intending to do the 3.4.1 update
as one update as well.

So, TLDR. If you're packaging a GNOME package that's just had a 3.3.92
upstream release and is about to have a 3.4.0 release, please build
the package like normal, but don't file an update. Instead add the
build ID to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtzJKpbiGX1zdGJzeU9waFJFZmgyQzBuN2VxU0lxbHc
and then I'll pick up the build for the mega update.

Hopefully this makes the updates system easier to QA, as GNOME is more
and more interconnected, and it' just not possible to QA updates when
you have a 3.3.91 version of gnome-settings-daemon and 3.4.1 version
of gnome-screenshot.

Thanks,

Richard.