On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Mike A. Harris wrote:
I don't think the process should be continued post-final though as it would churn excessive unnecessary updates to end users.
... and would make QA impossible. Red Hat does its QA on the binary packages that they provide and if they are happy with the result it doesn't matter if the package was rebuilt the day before or came out of a Fedora build one year ago. The whole idea of using well known binaries (and which go through QA and can be supported) is what keeps people paying to Red Hat. It's also what keeps many people downloading CentOS packages and not rebuilding the SRPMs themselves. If there's a problem they can compare with others running _the same binaries_ and find out if the problem comes from the binary or not; with binary packages built in a random order and random build environment, there is no possibility to talk about reproducible behaviour and makes any comparison meaningless.
So how do you (the OP) propose to do QA and bug tracking when each single package update can trigger an avalanche of other updates ?
Please note that I also find good the idea of self-hosting. It's a very good feeling to take the SRPM and have a binary package after just a 'rpmbuild -ba'. But I think that this goal has to be balanced with other goals to make a distribution.