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

[Nagy Gabor]

Allan McRae 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?

Well, I think this viewpoint is too elitist... I am not sure that you
should blame users who just read
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#LCD_filter_patched_packages 
and who don't even know that cairo is a dependency of gtk2. (Come on,
do you know well every installed library on your system?) And with
broken cairo the user just gets "fav_gtk_app: error while loading shared
libraries...", so it requires a little bit sophisticated bug-hunting.

I just mention the "-Sy system_breaker_package" issue again, where
sodepends or libpng14 could help.

I know that these system breakages require some user fault too, but I
think the main purpose of pacman (should be) to not allow break our
system. If I accepted your standpoint as a solution, I would suggest to
not use %CONFLICTS% array or versioned dependencies ;-) (Because "elite"
users should know that foo conflicts with bar, and all his packages
[dependencies] should be always up-to-date...)

Bye