Sorry picked wrong from address
Am 2017-01-05 10:28, schrieb Martin Gräßlin:
Am 2017-01-05 09:44, schrieb Ben Cooksley:
Hi all,
It seems that my previous vocal complaints about system level /
serious impact dependency bumps on the CI system have gone completely
unnoticed by (some) members of our Community.
This was demonstrated earlier this week when components of Plasma
bumped their version requirements for XKBCommon and Appstream-Qt -
without even a thought about notifying Sysadmin or checking which
version the CI had, until their builds broke.
Neither of these is easy to fix at this stage, as the system base is
now too old to receive updates such as these. Base upgrades require a
full rebuild of everything on the CI system, and usually involve
significant additional churn and is a process that must be done
roughly twice a year, depending on dependency bump demands.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we may avoid this in the
future?
I have a few questions here:
1) Where is this requirement to check with sysadmins codified? So far
I was only aware of dependency freeze.
2) How can we easily check what build.kde.org has? Looking at cmake
output is not a sufficient way as it gives me wrong information
3) What should we do when build.kde.org does not have the requirement?
It should be rather obvious that we don't introduce new dependencies
because we like to. There is a very important software reason to it.
That's the case for the xkbcommon dependency increase. Should I have
let the code broken as it was, expecting half a year of bug reports
till build.kde.org has the base upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04?
If I have to degrade the quality of the product for serving the CI, I
and all users have a problem. And this is currently the only
alternative. The quality of our product is highly at risk as our
changes are no longer compile tested. This is a huge problem for the
release of Plasma 5.9. On the other hand I cannot revert the
dependency change as that would break tests or introduce the broken
code again. So actually we are caught between a hard and a rock place.
When I increased the dependency I had the dependency freeze of Plasma
5.9 in mind. That's the one target I have to hit from release process
currently. Also I had to consider a social aspect here. I asked
xkbcommon devs to do the release. I would have feeled ashamed if we
asked for the release and then don't use it. For me it was from a
social point of view a very high requirement to ship with the
dependency in the next release after xkbcommon release.
If we have to wait an arbitrary time till build.kde.org has upgraded
the base, maybe the choice of the base is not sufficient. E.g. I asked
openSUSE about this dependency weeks ago. Actually a few days after
xkbcommon had the release and it was already shipped in tumbleweed.
Similar for Mesa 13 which I'm also eagerly waiting for build.kde.org
to fetch it.
Cheers
Martin
