On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > * #1350 Updates Policy should require inter-dependent packages be > submitted together (nirik, 18:15:37) > * LINK: https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1350 (nirik, 18:15:38) > * AGREED: Make policy changes now, defer enforcement until later > (+6,0,0) (nirik, 18:30:03) That ticket has already been closed, so I will comment here. Say that I have a package that I want to update, the update breaks somebody else's package, and I lack the knowledge to fix that other package. How much waiting for the other maintainer am I required to undergo? The discussion on the ticket implies that the answer is "an infinite amount of time". Is that really the intent? Let me present two cases where I think "an infinite amount of time" is the wrong answer. The first case is when a non-critpath package depends on a critpath package. I've got a concrete example. I maintain the polymake package. It has its hooks buried deeply into the guts of perl, so it depends on the exact perl version it was built with. Every major perl release, without fail, breaks polymake. Sometimes upstream has already noticed and I can update to the latest snapshot to fix the problem. Sometimes upstream has not noticed and I have to ask them to produce a fix, which can sometimes take a little while. If a critical perl update were needed, say to fix a glaring performance or security problem, and the update broke the polymake build, I think the right thing to do would be to push the perl update anyway. That will break things for me and both of the other people who use polymake (hi, guys!), but too bad for us. We can fix polymake as quickly as we can and get things back to normal, but we shouldn't block that update from going out to all of the people who need it. The second case is hypothetical, although it is loosely based on an actual situation I encountered a couple of years ago. Say that I want to push a non-backwards-compatible update to a library, and that packages A, B, and C depend on that library. I rebuild A and B successfully with the new version of the library, but C fails to rebuild. I try to diagnose the problem, but find that C is such a horrible mass of spaghetti that I can't make heads or tails out of it. So I file a bug against C and wait for the maintainer to respond. And wait. And wait. And wait. At what point am I allowed to push the new version of the library, along with A and B rebuilds, and write C off as a loss, since I can't fix it and the maintainer isn't responding? Does it depend on the severity of the problem the update is intended to fix? If so, who is the judge of degree of severity? -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
