RFC: Fedora revamp proposal

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 12:44 -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:

> Well, in that case I suppose we'd need to add a new tag-set, something
> like rawhide-pending 

In other words, another layer.

I'll only repeat this maybe every 6 months or yearly, depending on how
annoying people find me.  But basically, the #1 problem is the inability
of RPM to go backwards (i.e. versions must always go up).

It's like a car with no brakes and no reverse gear, driving down a road
that's being dynamically built in front of it.

A lot of times, the correct response to "stuff just broke!" is "revert".
Not just revert - revert *quickly*. Don't let the master tree be broken.
Don't go off a cliff just because someone put a wrong sign
on the road.

For example, let's say a new version of Mesa breaks GNOME with llvmpipe.
One really can't fault the Mesa maintainers, because it's quite possible
they tested it, just on the Intel or AMD hardware on their laptop.

But the correct response here is still to revert to the previous Mesa
until the problem is found and fixed.

If instead what we have is another "layer"/"repo" or state of packages,
this issue would end up blocking progress on *everything else* into
rawhide until it was fixed, because the AutoQA tests would just keep
failing. That's very problematic.

(This is assuming the AutoQA tests are something interesting and useful
like booting GNOME, and not spelling checks for the spec file
descriptions or something)

But given the drastic changes to RPM (and all the software built on top
of it like mock, koji, createrepo, etc.), that would be required to fix
this "newer is always better" problem, I can't fault you for saying we
should add another layer.