[Test-Announce] Fedora 21 Beta Test Compose 4 (TC4) Available Now!

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-10-17 at 16:52 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-10-18 at 07:48 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> > On 10/18/14 05:46, Andre Robatino wrote:
> > > As per the Fedora 21 schedule [1], Fedora 21 Beta Test Compose 4 (TC4)
> > > is now available for testing.
> > 
> > Just installed the KDE Live "spin" to disk and upon bootup found that
> > the rawhide repo enabled while the rest of the repos were disabled.
> > 
> > Intentional?
> 
> No. I'm guessing it's a problem with the change of name in
> fedora-release - fedora-release-standard was changed to
> fedora-release-nonproduct. Either there's a problem in comps /
> spin-kickstarts, or we didn't wait long enough to do the compose, or
> something. I'll take a look, thanks for the note.

Problem is in the fedora-release shenanigans that went into TC4 -
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2014-13090/fedora-release-21-0.16 - but I still need to plumb out exactly how. I think the fact that fedora-release now requires 'system-release-product' is contributing.

If you look on the KDE live for TC4 it's actually got completely the
wrong release packages. It has the generic ones:

[liveuser at localhost ~]$ rpm -qa | grep release
generic-release-rawhide-21-5.noarch
generic-release-21-5.noarch
fedora-release-notes-21.06-1.fc21.noarch

so far what I figure is this. There isn't actually a lot in Fedora which
directly requires a *release package of some sort. I believe it's just
the package `setup`, which requires "system-release". Both
fedora-release and generic-release provide "system-release".

If you use any kickstart to deploy Fedora which doesn't explicitly
specify one or other provider, you're ultimately going to get whatever
the depsolver gives you.

The 'environment groups' in comps explicitly require a fedora-release
package (fedora-release-(product) in the case of Server, Workstation
etc; fedora-release-nonproduct in the case of KDE etc) so they're OK.
But the KDE live image doesn't actually use the
'kde-desktop-environment' comps group, it just directly lists various of
the KDE package groups:

%packages
@kde-apps
@kde-desktop
@kde-media
@kde-telepathy
@networkmanager-submodules

(in fedora-kde-packages.ks). None of the other live images actually use
the environment groups either, they do something similar. Workstation is
OK in TC4 because the Workstation kickstart lists the
"workstation-product" comps group, and that lists the
'fedora-release-workstation' package directly.

You could say we should just go around sticking
fedora-release-nonproduct in a bunch of comps groups, but I'm not sure
that's quite the right answer - the whole point of having
generic-release in the first place is so people can do unbranded
Fedoras, and that would prevent people doing that.

So, why does the depsolver suddenly start giving us generic-release
instead of fedora-release? I'm not sure yet, but I have a theory - I
believe fedora-release's dependency chain got longer, and that affects
the depsolver's choice. In fedora-release-21-0.16, a requirement was
added to fedora-release for 'system-release-product', which is provided
by fedora-release-server, fedora-release-nonproduct etc. But
'generic-release' has no such matching requirement (nor do we in fact
have a generic-release-server, generic-release-workstation,
generic-release-nonproduct etc).

So basically you get generic-release because it can satisfy the
'system-release' requirement with a shorter dep chain, because it
doesn't also have to pull in a 'product' package to satisfy the
'system-release-product' dep.

I guess the straightforward way to fix this is just to bring
generic-release in line with fedora-release - if their depchains are
similar fedora-release wins out I believe alphabetically (man, this
stuff is hairy sometimes).

It'd help if we had anyone around who remembers how the generic-* stuff
was originally architected to work, and what the expectations were
around how people should use it, I guess.

I'll file a bug for this.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net