On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 03:13:07PM +0200, Martin Kolman wrote:
On Fri, 2019-08-09 at 14:00 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 02:28:55PM +0200, Jens-Ulrik Petersen wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 9:27 AM Igor Gnatenko <
> > ignatenkobrain(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Well, it was retired because it did not built since F30 mass rebuild…
> > >
> >
> > I went ahead and built it with the testsuite disabled for now: I suppose
> > any Proven Packager could also have done, but yeah normally it should be
> > done by the maintainers.
> > I admit the ball was dropped on this by various people (myself included),
> > and sorry about that. [1]
> > The new major upstream release was also a long time coming...
> >
> > But to me the deeper question is still "why are we proactively breaking
the
> > distro" in this way with package retirements by non-maintainers?
> >
> > Sure FTBFS is bad but there is no need to proactively remove core packages
> > which are still working okay.
> > I really really wish could stop this... causing more busy work and stress.
>
> When a FTBFS hits, we don't know whether the package is still working
> ok or not as there are many possible reasons for the failure.
Maybe this is something gating tests could help with ? If a package is FTBFS
and has reasonable gating test coverage, you will know it is working.
The gating CI is a pretty low bar right now. As CI is made stronger,
it could well actually make FTBFS *more* common, as CI is introducing
more scope for things to be classed as a failure. So be careful what
you wish for :-)
> Filing
> the FTBFS BZs informs the maintainer(s) & allows them to investigate,
> figure what has gone wrong & decide what changes are needed. Missing
> on 2 mass rebuilds means the package is still build with F29 toolchain,
> and thus lacking desired improvements Fedora is introducing, so this
> has a cost for the rest of the distro. Somewhere there's a balance
> between cost for the maintainer in work & cost for the distro in the
> package being outdated.
>
> There was no acknowlegement on the BZ that anyone was actively working
> on fixing it in 6 months. This is true for so many of the FTBFS BZs that
> get filed. If the packages don't get orphaned after 6+ months of being
> ignored, when would they ever be fixed ?
>
> Having said that, I think in the case of packages which are deps of
> so much of the distro, it could have been useful to have a warning of
> imminent orphaning on fedora-devel. There was a warning that orphaning
> was starting, but no list of affected packages included.
Maybe another job for automated tests/CI ?
Before dropping a batch of packages, do a test compose without them and postpone
the drop if the compose run crashes and burns.
Sounds really like something doable which could save a lot of everyones time once in
place.
We can't carry on postponing things indefinitely though - at some point we
have to say enough, and expect a maintainer to actually do some maintaining.
Regards,
Daniel
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