[arch-dev-public] Todos for language specific rebuilds

[Dave Reisner]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 16:43 Christian Rebischke via arch-dev-public <
arch-dev-public at archlinux.org> wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> I would like to propose that we create todos for rebuilds of language
> specific packages.
>
> We had two major rebuilds in the last months: python3.8 and ruby2.7.
>
> Can we agree that we create a todo before such rebuilds?
> The advantages outweigh the disadvantages. We would gain:
>

Hi,

I'm not sure I understand. Can you clearly state the problems we've
encountered due to not doing this? What downsides do you see to your
proposal? Can you think of any alternative solutions?

* More people help rebuilding the packages.
>

Solving the wrong problem, IMO. This is largely toil and should be
automated away. Foutrelis already has such a system that we've used for
rebuilds in the past. We could/should instead work towards making this more
generally available on the build machines.

* Every maintainer gets informed about the rebuild.
>

As a maintainer, I don't care that you're rebuilding my package to keep up
with library changes. Rather, I'm thankful to whomever did this for me.

Why would a language rebuild differ from any other soname bump?

* Maintainers have the possibility to test the packages.
>

Why is this not currently possible? Couldn't we just use testing prior to
pushing out to the repos (something we've done in the past and continue to
do)? What about packages which aren't using the lowlevel API and are simply
interpreted code. Those don't get rebuilt, but they're potentially impacted
by the language version bump. They'll never be called out on a rebuild lost
because we generate those based on ELF dependencies.

dR

If tools exist for creating todos, I would like to ask the persons with
> such tools to make them available for everybody (if not already
> happened).
>
> Greetings,
> shibumi
>