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

[hollunder]

Excerpts from Allan McRae's message of 2010-02-09 00:26:37 +0100:
> On 09/02/10 04:49, Xavier Chantry 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.
> 
> I think the answer to that is in the question: What did we do different 
> previously that resulted in far less of these issues?
> 
> My impression is that nothing has particularly change in terms of how 
> rebuilds are handled.  If anything, the whole process has become a lot 
> more streamlined and cases of missing a package rebuild are now almost 
> non-existent.
> 
> So the cause must be... A change in user-base? Maybe just an increase in 
> user-base resulting in more people who think Arch should be done their 
> way and not the Arch way?
>

I don't know whether you (I don't mean you alone) are just being cocky
or blind or I don't know what, but I've seen this attitude all over the
place and I don't get it.
By this attitude I refer to the total ignorance regarding these serious
problems, bye developers and regular users on IRC or right here.

Lots of people had issues when those new versions hit [extra], ranging
from the very common file corruptions due to incompletely synced mirrors
to minor and major breakage due to a lacking version check. I alone
observed lots of issues, on my system, on IRC and here. There was one
bug I reported which was flagged as not a bug (wrong version in
dependency array) and who knows how many more.

What's annoying here was the general attitude and 'good advices' given.
"works for me, you must be doing something wrong" or "you should have read
the frontpage, it tells you not to upgrade until the mirrors are synced"
which for example isn't what it says, and there's no way to check
whether they really are synced, but you get "good advice" anyway: "you
should have checked https://www.archlinux.de/?page=MirrorStatus" which
doesn't tell you in any way which mirror has fully synced.

Anyway, the point is that the update process is obviously flawed,
otherwise there wouldn't be so many people having issues. A user with
issues gets bad/useless advice served with a cocky attitude. If a user
makes actual improvement suggestions, like Fons does, he also gets mostly
useless responses with the same attitude.

The only one who has attempted to be somewhat constructive so far was
Aaron, so kudos for that. I'm sorry for my language in this mail but I'm
somewhat angry about how this seems to turn out.

Regards,
Philipp