Re: dependancies and bulk builds

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:13:29AM +0200, Dieter Baron wrote:
> In article <20080522204844.GA10788%antioche.eu.org@localhost> Manuel wrote:
> : the way we currently handle depandancies in bulk builds is really 
> suboptimal.
> : The perl upgrade was a disaster, almost everything was rebuilt, taking
> : several days, because of this. But in most case it's just a depedancy at 
> build
> : time (perl is part of the tools) and the resulting binaries don't depend on 
> it.
> : A lot of time to provide updated binaries could have been saved here.
> :
> : Now it's libvorbis which has been updated, causing kdelibs to be rebuilt
> : So all kde will be rebuilt, and I suspect a lot of gnome too.
> : Again it's just a PKGREVISION bump, I'm almost sure the abi didn't change
> : and rebuilding the whole set of packages depending on it up to LEAF packages
> : is just a waste of time.
> :
> : Would someone have a look at improving this ?
> 
>   What kind of improvements do you have in mind.  By what criteria
> would you consider a package to be up to date?

If a dependancy changed in a way that doesn't affect the resulting binary
(no ABI changes in the library for example). It's possible we don't have
the needed informations in pkgsrc for that yet.

> 
>   The current approach guarantees correctness at the cost of longer
> build time.  While saving build time is a worthwhile goal, we should
> not sacrifice correctness of the resulting (official) binary packages.

When a binary update for a security fix comes more than one week later
because pbulk decided to rebuild 90% of the 7526 packages, the update isn't
really usefull. If we want to be serious about providing binary packages,
the security updates have to show up in a reasonable time.

> 
> [...]
> 
>   How do you want to distinguish between cases where all dependencies
> must be rebuilt vs. where only direct dependencies must be rebuilt
> vs. where nothing needs to be rebuilt, in a way simple enough so
> developers don't screw it up?

I don't know but obviously other projets providing binaries have a way to
do it.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--