On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 02:16:43PM +0200, Till Maas wrote:
Hi,
On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 01:53:28PM +0200, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> The second one is pretty strong one. Does it incue system packages too? If
> so, note that it can be hard to adapt some packages to new GCC or (in
> future) new JDK11 in short interval of two mass rebuilds.
The short interval is usually six months (not that short) and I guess if
an important package cannot be rebuilt because of a new GCC or JDK, we
need a compatibility package to make sure the package can still be
built.
Yep, 6+ months is not short. I don't think that having non-buildable
packages serves the distribution well. Our primary role is to provide
bug fixes, and in particular to provide security fixes _quickly_. If a
package does not build, it's better to not distribute it as a part of
a release, to make the situation clear to users, and let it return
once it's fixed. Having non-building packages is a liability. It's
also something that drags the whole distribution down, making it very
hard to do any kind of mass change, because most time is spent
fighting with unrelated ftbfs.
Zbyszek