RFC: Fedora revamp proposal

[Olav Vitters]

On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 07:18:04PM +0100, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> Some of the things we want to achieve:
> * Make rawhide to be reliably installable and usable by developers by
> coherently introducing changes.

Mageia packages libraries by the .so major version. So you can upgrade a
library and then work on rebuilding all the software.

Example (library name is not too important):
  lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_1-0.9-1.mga2
  lib64spice-client-gtk3.0_4-0.15-3.mga3

Developers can work on the new library, then gradually packagers can
work on rebuilding all the software. At no point will a users machine
break because you still have the old library.

Obvious drawback is making 'yum' (or whatever) intelligent enough to
automatically remove those libraries. Also it should be removed from the
main mirror at one point (Mageia does that after 2 weeks, so any
dependant package needs to be rebuild within those 2 weeks). After those
2 weeks you could have issues if you install 'Rawhide' and the old
library is not available in the repository anymore.



Another factor is that on Fedora, it seems that it is ok to break
Rawhide. At Mageia that is totally unacceptable. If it happens
accidentally, ok, but very frowned upon if you just push changes you
know might cause issues. Various things are done for those: test
some changes yourself (when it seems needed), announce possible problems
on the mailing list, push some changes to a special testing repository
(to get more people to test your changes other than just you).

-- 
Regards,
Olav