Note on 'systemd-216-9'

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2014 at 08:30:32AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> An update has been submitted for systemd today:
> 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/kmod-18-4.fc21,systemd-216-9.fc21
> 
> with a fairly short description. I wanted to flag up that, in fact,
> systemd-216-9 is a major change from systemd-216-8 and is not really
> systemd 216 at all.
Hi Adam,

this annoucement misrepresents the situation quite a bit. Since you
are speaking from your position as QA chief, your word carries a lot
of weight. We *were* in contact on IRC yesterday, I'm in #fedora-devel
semi-permanently, and it should not be a problem to show it to me
before you sent it out, since you are talking about updates I made. If
you disagreed with what I have to say and *then* sent the mail, that
would be fine, but not like this, out of the blue.

Anyway, returning to the matter at hand, systemd-216-9 is fairly close
to systemd-216-8, has patches over it to fix *known bugs*, the ones
listed in the update, a few listed on the freedesktop systemd bug
tracker, and a few small ones I found while testing the update. The
delta is not as small as I would like, but fits imho in the rules.  If
systemd upstream was doing point releases, this would certainly
qualify as one.

Actually it was 216-2 which contained the biggest change. I built it
on Oct 7, before the alpha freeze. It was called "216" because 217
wasn't tagged yet, and I didn't want F21 to miss the bugfixes and
features which have accumulated in the upstream git. So 216-2 has most
of the post-216 commits, and 216-9 is fairly close to that. It *is*
built from 217 by reverting the major changes done after 216-2, but
that is a matter of convenience... It was simply simpler and more
explicit this way (reverts not ommitted patches).

> systemd-216-8 (and 216-1 through 216-5) and earlier) was more or less
> identical to upstream systemd-stable 216:
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd-stable/log/?h=v216-stable .
> systemd "216-9" is not built from 216 at all, it is in fact systemd-217
> with some particular changes (presumably intended to be the most
> disruptive ones) reverted. When I dropped build-related files and
> directories and documentation from the trees, did a context-free
> recursive diff, and filtered out the metadata from the diff, it still
> worked out at >7,000 lines worth of additions and removals between the
> underlying code of 'systemd-216-8' and 'systemd-216-9'. This is a lot of
> change to land between Beta and Final.
Like I said on IRC yesterday, a large part of this is code which is
not compiled for Fedora, or unsupported [*], or tests.

> Testers, please take care to test the update thoroughly, despite the
> small bump and small description it is a major change to the package.
That I can agree with. I'd much prefer a concrete list of things to
test in this update though, which would be *useful* and lead to a
better release. Right now you suggest that anything might be broken.

Zbyszek


[*] systemd-resolved, systemd-networkd