On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 04:43:30PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 11:45:33PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> * Fedora should (IMO) institute mandatory mass rebuilds. Either every
> cycle, or every other cycle. I've briefly discussed with Dennis.
> Bootstrapping (and similar activities) are far easier with a clean set
> of deps, which is the case for F15. It should always be the case that we
> know everything builds and self-hosts through a mass rebuild per cycle.
This has been raised with FESCO in the past, and I don't think there's
any fudnamental disagreement on it. But scheduling one mass rebuild per
cycle doesn't prevent us ending up in a broken state unless we do it
right at the end of the cycle, and right now that's problematic in terms
of release process - rebuilding everything we've just QAed is an
excellent way to introduce subtle breakage. So it really needs to be an
out-of-archive verification rather than one that's targetted at the
release, and we need the resources and manpower to handle it.
Alternately, we could take a lesson from our compatriots at openSUSE.
Their openSUSE Build Service throws a combination of automated
intelligence and hardware at the problem. Given the package
dependency tree, if package B BuildRequires package A, then every time
A gets rebuilt, B is also bumped and rebuilt. This causes build
breakage to get caught fairly early in the process (rather than via an
asynchronous out-of-tree process), and the resulting packages are available in
their equivalent of the rawhide tree for test and use.
--
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist
Dell | Office of the CTO