On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:28 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: > Care to write up a proposal on how this work-flow would look like? Without > some of the details, I'm confused how one would avoid all kinds of weirdness > from repo conflicts if you have multiple of these repos enabled. That, and the > fact that everything is built from a single buildroot at the moment. I probably couldn't do much justice to a comprehensive plan as I have insufficient knowledge of how the buildsystem works. I was acting at a higher level - just trying to point out that it's essentially doomed to try and please everyone with a single update repository, that's not an argument anyone can win. Either the 'we want stable updates' camp or the 'we want shiny new stuff' camp is going to be disappointed. I'm not sure what kind of weirdness you mean, but I have to emphasize this isn't some kind of theoretical system, it really exists in the really real world :). I have three Mandriva machines (not worth the bother converting them to Fedora), some using /backports and /updates repositories, some just /updates, and there's no 'weirdness' involved. Probably the major issue I can think of is that maintainers pushing /backports packages should be careful to forward port changes done on the /updates branch to /backports, so that those using the more adventurous updates don't miss out on any security / bug fixes done in the stabler updates. But since the person doing /backports packages and the person doing /updates packages are usually exactly the same person, this doesn't present much of a problem. Oh, I just realized, in case it's not clear - in the MDV system, the adventurous repo (/backports) is complementary to the stable repo (/updates), it doesn't replace it. You either use /updates and /backports, or just /updates; using /backports but not /updates is not intended or supported. Yes, there would have to be some kind of accommodation in the build bots for this. Packages intended for the adventurous updates branch would have to be built in an environment which used that repository *and* the stable updates repository as a source, and packages intended for the stable updates branch would have to be built in an environment which only used the stable repository as a source. It's more work, yes, as I said in my initial mail :) The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous updates to be sent there. Of course, packages sent to /backports can break sometimes, but that's not unexpected, and no different to shipping updates of the same level of potential brokenness in a single update repository, as we currently do. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
