[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Brendan Long]

On 02/08/2010 11:56 AM, Ray Kohler wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Xavier Chantry<shiningxc at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> With every big rebuilds we get new breakage stories. It seems like
>> it's the norm nowadays rather than the exception.
>>
>> I am wondering if it's really only the users that are to blame.. or if
>> Arch is also to blame. Or if Arch was supposed to be an elitist
>> distribution and is victim of its success.
>>
>> More importantly, I am wondering if the sodepends/soprovides proposal
>> would not actually be a more complex solution than the
>> libfoo2/libfoo3/libfoo4 way.
>>      
> I haven't seen a single reported problem from any of the recent big
> rebuilds that wasn't the result of a user doing something they ought
> not to do (usually piecemeal updates), an out-of-sync mirror (plus
> users that can't even recognize this when they see it), or AUR
> packages not rebuilt (again, along with users that don't know they
> have to do this for themselves).
>
> I think "blame the users" is quite adequate as a solution to these
> kinds of problems. There truly is a minimum level of understanding and
> competency required to run Arch, and a huge number of users that
> apparently don't come anywhere close to meeting it.
>    
Couldn't the piecemeal update problem be fixed by just putting version 
numbers in the depends() section in each updated package, so for the 
libpng rebuild for example, depends(... libpng>=#.#)? It would fix the 
problem in the most obvious/arch-like way.