[Mageia-dev] Possible failure in our update process

Samuel Verschelde stormi at laposte.net
Sat Aug 27 23:46:01 CEST 2011


Le jeudi 18 août 2011 17:46:06, John Balcaen a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> I noticed a problem with our update process thanks to bug #2450 [1]
> Here we pushed a update to kipi-plugins package (due to a missing
> requires) but the update ends up in a totally broken installation for
> the end user which was not noticed by me (first in fault) & later by
> QA.
> 
> Currently every package built for updates are done against
> core/release, core/updates and core/updates_testing, here when i
> pushed kipi-plugins update, KDE 4.6.5 was already available in
> core/updates_testing so as expected kipi-plugins get linked against
> KDE 4.6.5 & not against KDE 4.6.3 (available in core/release)
> Since most of actors of the QA are simply installing all packages from
> core/updates_testing  (like me) none of us noticed that it would break
>  without KDE 4.6.5 installed and when probably for first updates
> people are using a « fresh Mageia 1» , with several packages in
> updates_testing in the same moment we can't really expect them to
> removed or reinstall/restore a Mageia 1 for every package available in
> testing.
> 
> A workaround (which could also ease work for QA people) would be to
> have some temporary repositories as suggested by bolkm on irc, it
> could be based on SRPM package name but for some project like KDE  it
> would need more hacks since RPMS needed to be builded in a specific
> order.
> 
> The QA user will be able to simply add a new media (like
> urpmi.addmedia $mirror/core/updates_testing/packagetotest/ ) so it
> will be more easy to test a package & *only* this one.
> 
> Another solution is to rebuild the package when moving in on
> core/updates_release but in that case the package tested by QA is of
> course not the same as the one available previously in testing.
> 
> What do you think ?
> 
> 

If I understand correctly, the problem is when several packages interfere with 
each other. One thing that could help would be that after submit each update 
candidate be checked by a script that would :
- detect BuildRequires that are present in updates_testing
- (needed ?) detect Requires that are present in updates_testing

When there are such dependencies that come from updates_testing, it means that 
they have not been pushed to updates yet, and that the update candidate that 
is being checked must be treated with care.

In kipi-plugins case, maybe following such a check, we would have decided to 
ship it as part of the big KDE update and not as a standalone update.

The updates policy would have to be adapted so that this check becomes part of 
every update candidate validation.

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I'm sending it to you all the same :)

Samuel


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