On 08/28/2013 06:35 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 18:22:57 +0300
Panu Matilainen <pmatilai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hum... a question, or perhaps more like two:
Are you planning to move the remaining RHEL-6 builders to Fedora too,
and if so, is this (builders running on Fedora ~latest) going to be a
permament arrangement?
Quite possibly. Left is a pair of buildhw (hardware builders), buildppc
(power7 boxes, mostly for epel6), and bkernel (kernel and secureboot
builders). We are going to look and see if those can be moved over too
without pain.
yeah, I think the plan is to do this moving forward (Fedora latest that
is).
Awesome. Just awesome.
If the answer to both is "yes" then this is wonderful news for the
package-management department.
It's good for infrastructure as well, in that we don't need to carry
any 'special' rpm or anything if we need to change formats or the like.
From package-management POV this makes it *possible* to meaningfully
introduce certain types of new features. The builders being stuck on
several years old, practically frozen version of rpm (and yum etc) has
been one of, or perhaps *the* biggest roadblock and demotivating aspect
in rpm development:
1) implement installation-related feature X in upstream git
2) wait for it to make its way next stable upstream release
3) wait for the upstream release to make its way into Fedora
4) grow many more gray hairs while waiting for next major RHEL version
5) wait a bit more for the builders to move to the new RHEL
6) wait for the feature to be sanctioned for use in Fedora by FPC
7) wait for packagers to start adopting the new thing
...
8) realize there's a flaw in X, hindering or even preventing its
real-world usage
9) pray and beg for approval to fix it in RHEL
10) wait at least half a year for the next RHEL update to come out
11) go back to 7), rinse and repeat as necessary
For a practical example of the timescale of this "process" as things
have been so far: opt-in install-time macro-expansion of scriptlets was
implemented upstream in March 2010 and has been in Fedora since F15. Yet
this relatively trivial thing *still* cannot be actually used in any
version of Fedora, and nobody knows (or would not be allowed to say)
when RHEL+1 comes out, so after 3.5 years from implementing the stupid
thing, we're only at step 4) with an unknown (but in any case lengthy)
time before being anywhere near 7).
So if people are still wondering why rpm moves at such glacial pace...
Having builders run Fedora latest-stable cuts the time from
implementation to being deployable (or at least real-world testable) in
Fedora literally by *years*, and the turn-around for steps 8-11 from
months to days.
Let me say AWESOME one more time :)
Of course it does mean we could run into breakage if there's breakage
in Fedora land, but thats good to know and fix too.
Yes, dogfooding on the builders can IMO only be a good thing for overall
stability of Fedora, even if it might initially cause some extra
hickups. Breaking the builders a couple of times and getting scolded for
that ought to make people think a bit more about pushing potentially
destabilizing updates :)
- Panu -
--
devel mailing list
devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
