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Various notes on /usr unificationVarious notes on /usr unificationPosted Feb 28, 2012 9:20 UTC (Tue) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322)Parent article: Various notes on /usr unification
Another example of flag day vs. gradual transition was the move to UTF-8 manual pages. Fedora did that by changing their man configuration and all packages shipping non-ASCII pages in a flag day; in Debian, I made man detect page encodings on the fly and then changed the packaging tools to produce UTF-8 pages by default, at which point there was no need to upload all packages shipping non-ASCII pages in one go.
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Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 11:21 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Fedora also loves doing mass rebuilds, where *almost* every packages gets rebuilt. Fedora 15 had one of these (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_15_Mass_Rebuild); on Fedora 16 desktop, for instance, there are only 371 packages last built for other than Fedora 15 or 16, from a total of 25995 packages (these numbers are from a simple grep of a repoquery -a output). Fedora 17 apparently had yet another mass rebuild (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_17_Mass_Rebuild).
Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:30 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
Fedora mass rebuilds are done when the compiler is updated, mostly.
Mass rebuilds Posted Mar 1, 2012 12:59 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Same for Debian, except that it's usually a single developer with too much free time and/or raw CPU power on their hands who decides to do their own personal mass rebuild – and file bugs about everything that fails to build.
Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:44 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
And the Fedora ARM dept has realised that they are going to need a lot of ARM build machinery if they wish to continue doing that (because it still takes a whole heap longer - although of course this improves over time).
Mass rebuilds are good for checking everything is still buildable (Debian regularly finds old stuff that doesn't actually rebuild anymore due to changes around it, because we do in fact do test mass rebuilds on x86 from trime to time), and it propogates toolchain improvements. But it does need much more build resource than incremental building. The more arches you support the harder it is to do.
Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:48 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
This is one of those key-but-unimportant distinctions between Debian users and Fedora users. Debian users like the way that Debian does things and Fedora users like the way that Fedora does things, that's why they use those systems, and tend to look askance at each other when they hear about the differences in the way the systems work. This is one of the reasons that it's often hard to explain to new users what exactly is so different between distributions when the packaged software is nearly identical.
Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:43 UTC (Tue) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Debian does the same, but throws the binaries away and only keeps the logs of failed builds (in bug reports).
Various notes on /usr unification Posted Feb 28, 2012 17:39 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Do you have an estimate on how long the gradual process took to complete for the case you bring up?
I think there is a truism that just can't be gotten around. The different approaches to distribution release timescale being used by Debian versus Fedora greatly influence decision making.
I think there is a lot of truth to the idea that Debian's "release when its ready" approach with much longer timescales between official releases of a stable offering is more aligned with gradual technology transitions.
I also think that the Fedora twice yearly release cycle timescale imposes constraints which weigh against gradual processes in favor of distinct coordinated transitions.
And I further believe that this is an entirely okay situation as Debian and Fedora as projects put the emphasis on very different priorities in their project focus. Hopefully the good new ideas will cross-pollinate. And the bad ideas will be allowed to quietly be allowed to taken outback and shot.
-jef
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