Release criteria proposal: conflicts / dependencies

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 02:34:35PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 12:31:47 -0700,
>   Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > During today's blocker review meeting, releng have come out all
> > enthusiastic about having no broken dependencies or unintentional
> > conflicts in any package (not just packages present on the media) at
> > final release time. So, here is a proposed release criterion to cover
> > this. Proposed for Final stage.
> > 
> > There must be no file conflicts (cases where the files in some packages
> > conflict but the packages have explicit Conflicts: tags are acceptable)
> > or unresolved package dependencies in any package in the stable release
> > repository.
> 
> I like to see that always be a requirement for the stable, stable+updates
> and rawhide (assuming the rawhide-pending tag becomes a reality).

I would like to see this eventually too.  However, we don't have a
capability to stop it from happening, other than our current method of
relying on people to do the right thing.  That could effectively mean
that anyone could inadvertently hold up shipping a release at "the
edge of space" through a bad push.

What if we were to graduate this requirement at the point when we have
automatic tools that give us better certainty that broken deps won't
happen except in dire circumstances?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com