[Fedora-packaging] Packages without a dist tag

[Kamil Paral]

> here's the meeting logs where disttag was made mandatory:
> 
> http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2014-12-04/fpc.2014-12-04-17.02.log.html
> 
> Looks like most of those packages could have it added but there are a
> few exceptions (the fedora-release-* packages were noted in that
> meeting).
> 
> -Toshio

Thanks for the link. I'm not sure I understood the reason for having an exception for fedora-{release,repos}*. The log says:

17:41:58 <tibbs|w> There's no reason for them to do so, since their version is tied to the distro version.

Which is true, but why is that a reason to grant them an exception? Would it cause any problems it they contained a distro tag as well?


To clarify what we're trying to do in Taskotron: We work with NVRs quite a lot. Sometimes we need to know "which Fedora/EPEL version was this NVR built for?". We figured we could parse the dist tag, which is very efficient, but its presence needs to be guaranteed (if we don't want to maintain a list of hardcoded exceptions and use some different logic for those).

The only other approach we came up with is to query Koji for each NVR, retrieve the build info, and derive this information from the build target. The downside is that it involves a lot of requests to Koji. We want to avoid stressing the Fedora infrastructure unnecessarily, if we can figure out this information in some other (offline) way. This would also make our tests run longer and crash more often (every network request is a potential point of failure).

So, our question is whether we can rely on all packages having a dist tag (we will report bugs against those which don't). If we can't, we'll need to implement the less efficient way (at least for those missing the dist tag).

Thanks,
Kamil