Re: Don't update to current cooker

On 01/24/2012 05:00 PM, Jeffrey Johnson wrote:
> I can "partially" agree.
>
> The argument for a "smarter build system" however confuses the build tools used
> with the build process task.
>
> Current build systems like OBS and ABF (and koji+mock) use a depsolver.
> The depsolver under build systems would have been "partially" broken by the
> recent libpng1.5 upgrade just as effectively as the depsolver used to
> upgrade clients was. For ABF, its is in fact the same URPMI depsolver
> in use with identical (and broken) libpng1.5 assertions.
>
> I do say "partially" because the chroot's constructed for builds
> are usually constructed differently, without graphics, and so
> the depsolver would be more immune to libpng1.5 breakage
> than the depsolver used to update desktops. But that is merely
> a "partial" accident of the usage case, not anything directly solved
> by "smarter build systems".
>
> Its the process of attempting to use just built packages in a process eedback loop
> in a build system, or through repository mirrors delivering to users, with
> minimal (and inadequate) QA that is breaking,
>
> And its the process, not the tools, that has to be redesigned somehow,
> or the "smarter build systems" will break just as often as cooker breaks.
I can also "partially agree".

Breaks in cooker happen quite often, they are just not as big as the 
ones caused by Perl update. Some big updates can require more manual 
work and for them a special process can make sense, indeed. But I 
believe that such updates are not numerous/frequent.

Numerous breaks arise, for example, when a package update requires 
dependent packages to be rebuilt (this is the case for perl update, as 
well). Currently it's a common situation when nobody cares about 
rebuilding them until facing problems when updating from cooker. This is 
the problem the build system can help to solve, making cooker much more 
consistent without much efforts from maintainers side.

-- 
Denis Silakov, ROSA Laboratory.
www.rosalab.ru