Hi,
On 26-09-2019 20:24, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2019-09-26 at 11:20 -0700, Tom Stellard wrote:
On 09/26/2019 11:03 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
We are currently in the "Beta to Pre Release" phase of the release
cycle. The updates policy for this phase -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy#Beta_to_Pre_Release -
says:
"From this point onwards maintainers MUST[1]:
Avoid Major version updates, ABI breakage or API changes if at all
possible."
However, it seems a major new release of LLVM is appearing in F31 at
present, and AFAIK there has been no discussion or communication about
this at all.
LLVM 9 is currently in the buildroot, and an update with a very short
description has been submitted:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2019-b83bd6b46c
(it just says "Update for LLVM 9 rebase.", which is odd since it *is*
the LLVM 9 rebase).
There is no Change for this, I can't find a mail about it anywhere,
it's just been sort of dumped in. Is there enough grounds for dumping
in a major new LLVM and violating the update policy at this point in
the F31 release?
There are compatibility packages included in the update, so there should not
be any ABI breakage from this update. Also, what exactly is the main
issue right now? Is it the buildroot overrides?
This is what caused me to notice it, yes. Another update got built
against LLVM 9 because it was in the buildroot, which means that update
is now not installable without the LLVM 9 update:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2019-52ecb9952b
openQA caught this, which put me onto the change.
Having compatibility packages is great, but it doesn't save us if there
turns out to be a problem in LLVM 9 itself. The rule about not doing
major changes after Beta is not really about breaking ABI for existing
packages, it is about the major changes themselves introducing
instability and potentially new bugs at a point in the cycle when we
are *supposed* to be stabilizing towards a final release.
I have the feeling that this is mostly a communication problem.
You are completely right that we should be stabilizing things now
and not be introducing major changes. But that is one side of the
story.
OTOH we also want F31 to work with current hardware when it ships;
and llvm is kinda special in this regard, its main use in Fedora
is inside the graphics stack and mesa needs llvm9 to support the
AMD Radeon 5700 series cards which have been out for a while now.
So the new mesa update you point to depending on the new llvm is
by design. One thing which did go wrong here IMHO is that the
new llvm and mesa really should be a single update in bodhi.
Did I understand correctly that llvm is not even in bodhi yet?
because in that case we can rectify this by adding the llvm
packages to the existing mesa update in bodhi (which should
have been done from the start).
If we put the new llvm + mesa together in a single update, then
as long as they are in testing, rollback should also be easy.
I have personally already received inquiries from users
about radeon 5700 support, so I personally see getting this
into F31 final as a good thing.
TL;DR: I believe that the intent here is good, but next time
this needs better communication / coordination.
Regards,
Hans
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