Fedora 12 Mass Rebuild

Goal
The goal is to rebuild every single Fedora package, regardless of content, before the Fedora 12 Feature Freeze (July 28th).

Driving Features
This requires a change in redhat-rpm-config for the i686 flags, as well as a koji config change to build for i686 rather than i586 by default. These two changes have happened as of Friday, July 17th.
 * Architecture Support

This requires redhat-rpm-config changes for default payload compression, as well as new RPM and XZ packages for koji builders. Bill Nottingham and Dennis Gilmore are responsible for getting the packages built for Koji. Bill Nottingham is responsible for getting the redhat-rpm-config changes in place, which depend on the koji packages being live first.
 * XZ RPM payloads

Schedule
Given the changes required for the above features and the given schedules, Release Engineering will be ready to start scripted rebuilds on Thursday, July 23rd. All automated rebuilds should be finished prior to the Feature Freeze, which is July 28th. Any clean-up manual rebuilds should be finished prior to the Alpha Freeze, which is August 4th.

Note that deltarpms will be disabled for the duration of the mass rebuild.

Opting Out
Release Engineering has given maintainers the ability to opt out of the scripted rebuild in order to do the build on their own. Note that every single package needs to be rebuilt, regardless of the contents.

In order to opt out of the scripted rebuild, a maintainer will need to check a file into their package's devel/ branch, named noautobuild. This file should contain a short rationale of why you wish to do the build yourself.

If the build initiation script encounters such a file, it will skip that package. However, given the tight deadlines (Feature freeze being the 28th of July, Alpha Freeze being the 4th of August), a very short grace period will be given for completing the builds on your own. If your build has not been attempted by the 1st of August, the script will no longer honor the noautobuild request and will attempt to rebuild your package. If, however, a rebuild has been attempted, the script will bypass your module. This should prevent multiple attempts to build something that fails for one reason or another.

Scripts
Release Engineering has created two scripts. One is to initiate the builds, and the other is to query for items still needing to be built.

Build Initiation
The rebuild script works in the following way:

Generate a list of all packages in dist-f12 Loop through each package: Query if a build has already been attempted/completed since koji changes went live. If so, move to next package If not, check out CVS Check for a noautobuild file If so, move to next package If not, rpmdev-bumpspec cvs commit;tag make (background) build Move on to next package

Each step will have some error catching and logging so that people can clean up the various failures for whatever reasons. The builds will be background builds, which will allow other builds done to take higher priority when a builder has a free slot. However maintainers should take care when doing this so that the background build won't take 'latest' precedent when it finishes. Asking rel-eng to kill the scripted build will typically be enough.

Build Tagging
Once the rebuild script has finished, another script will run to tag the builds into dist-f12. This script will check that a newer build hasn't been done or started in dist-f12 since the scripted rebuild was submitted. This will protect against the scripted rebuild overriding an even newer build done while the scripted rebuild was waiting in the background.

Status Query
Release Engineering has developed a script to query dist-f12 and report on packages that have yet to be rebuilt. Results of these queries will be delivered to various places, yet to be determined, broken down by maintainer for easier discovery of work needed.

Maintainer Actions

 * Maintainers that wish to do their own builds should read the Opting Out section.
 * Maintainers can help this effort by ensuring rpmdev-bumpspec correctly bumps your package's spec files.
 * Maintainers should ensure that their packages currently build from source.
 * Maintainers should ensure that there are no unwanted changes committed to CVS but not built yet.

How do I opt out of the scripted rebuild?
See the Opting Out section.

When will my own build "count" for the rebuild?
After the updated redhat-rpm-config for XZ RPM Payloads is put into place, a build done by a maintainer will "count" toward the rebuild. The exact timing of this is not determined, but should likely happen after 0000 UTC Thursday the 23rd.

Will the rebuilds be ordered?
Currently there is no plan to logically order the rebuilds based on deps. The ordering will be alphanumerical based on package name. There are no planned ABI/soname changes that would require logical build ordering. Further, all the builds will be kept in a special tag (dist-f12-rebuild) until the whole run is done, and then they will be tagged into dist-f12 in one shot to minimize the shuffle of buildroot contents during the rebuilds.

Feedback
Questions/comments/concerns should be directed to fedora-devel-list, the discussion page, or #fedora-devel on freenode IRC.