On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 07:00, Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org> wrote:


On Tue, Jan 26, 2021, at 6:27 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 03:12:50AM +0100, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> > IMHO, the real issue is the one Robbie Harwood pointed out: It should NOT be
> > a common occurrence for a provenpackager to have to rebuild a package, and
> > in particular, provenpackagers should NOT do scripted mass changes. A
> > provenpackager should always check what the latest package in Rawhide
> > actually is before blindly rebuilding dist-git HEAD. (As a provenpackager, I
> > always do that before I do anything to a package owned by someone else.)
>
> We have to do scripted mass rebuilds to manage the OCaml package set.
> Anything else is completely unscalable and will in effect mean we will
> have to drop anything but bare-minimum OCaml support in Fedora.

This debate will keep happening because we can't effect any any actual change in the buildsystem because involves a lot of hard choices and deleting code.


s/a lot of hard choices and deleting code/a lot of hard choices, deleting code, downtimes which would have us miss our 6 month release window, and making a lot of people CHANGE what they have done for 10+ years (in some cases 20+)/
 
the second and third ones are manageable. The first and last one are the things which kill projects,  because even if people want to change they do not want to deal with all the years of infighting and relitigation of every hard choice and every change in routine. Plans which are meant to deal with this change need to cover how those two hard parts can be dealt with in some way. Without it, few people will sign up to try a change when they know the crabs in the bucket are going to just pull them back in.



--
Stephen J Smoogen.