[CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag

[Michael A. Peters]

Radu-Cristian FOTESCU wrote:

> 
> 
>> If a SRPMS builds under CentOS 5.0 and it doesn't
>> under 5.3,then this package is broekn.
>>
>> Ok, you're making it yourself very hard now, but I 
>> will accept scripts/tools that can verify this. 
>> I don't think any other repository is 
>> even doing this though.
> 
> Now you're wrong. You must be wrong.


Unfortunately there has not been the binary compatibility I had hoped 
for. The move to FireFox 3 was an understandably necessary change that 
broke some stuff, but other things (especially in EPEL) have been 
updated that in a perfect world would have only had security patches and 
functionallity fixes backported to them.

However, the man power just doesn't exist to maintain EPEL that way.

> 
> Say, TUV releases EL5.3. I am *sure* they rebuild *all* the
> packages, not only whatever was affected on the way from 5.2->5.3.
> 
> This is what *each* and every repo should be doing when EL releases
> a point update: to rebuild EVERYTHING, just to check it still works.

This I agree with, to a point.
Not everything needs a rebuild pushed, but certainly anything that 
doesn't build should have the spec fixed for new release, a mass rebuild 
(even if not all are actually pushed) can detect that.

I suspect again though it is a matter of resources not existing.
If shared libraries rarely ever changed though, then there would be less 
of this type of problem, but unfortunately they do change, at least in 
the third party repos.