Christoph Wickert wrote:
You are lucky. In the past people broke my package without further
notice and I had to take care of fixing them. On the other hand there
are maintainers, that announce changes in advance and ask me if I'm fine
with them rebuilding my packages or if I want to take care of this
myself. This is how it should be but only proven packagers will be able
to do this.
Take KDE for example: Although the KDE SIG is doing a great job in
avoiding breakdowns, I doubt that each and every maintainer of a QT or
KDE app is always aware of the changes before they happen. If things
still seem to be working in F-13 or rawhide, he might not even be aware
of the custom tag.
In KDE SIG, for releases, we normally identify packages needing a rebuild
ourselves and will just rebuild them and include them in our update set.
(The branched F13 will also work like that, though I don't think we'll need
to bump another KDE-related soname from now to the F13 release, we're
tracking the stable 4.4.x branch now, even stuff like the kipi framework in
kdegraphics with unstable ABI keeps it stable in release branches.) For
Rawhide, we'll also rebuild stuff if the maintainer doesn't do it by
himself, but usually we'll give the maintainer a chance to do it first.
We also announce the new versions and warn about the presence of buildroot
overrides in devel-announce, as well as on our own mailing list and IRC
chan. If people don't read even devel-announce, there's nothing we can do
about that, we aren't telepathic. ;-) It also helps to be on #fedora-kde on
IRC if you maintain KDE/Qt packages, but the important announcements go to
devel-announce as well.
Honestly, I don't recall automated updates of my packages except
for the
mass rebuilds from rel-eng. If the people that break things and/or
requested the custom tag will take care of this, we are fine, bug FWIW
it's not like this in rawhide. Let's see how it turns out in F-13.
I'll do what I can to fix broken dependencies (as I did in the past; I fixed
all the remaining broken dependencies for the F12 release), but I hope I
won't be the only one! I can probably fix all broken dependencies alone if
there are at most a dozen, but not if there are a hundred!
I think we still need to be able to treat F-13 different than in the
released branches, at least before beta freeze. If we need to do things
in rawhide first and only push these changes to F-13 afterwards, a
feature with a tight schedule like Xfce 4.8 is lost. That's just what I
said.
You can build the stuff in F13 right away, you'll just need rel-eng help
with buildroot overrides.
Kevin Kofler