On Fri, 2021-10-22 at 12:20 +1030, Simon Lees wrote:
On 10/21/21 23:04, Martin Wilck wrote:
I'm not sure if I fully understand. From a naïve package maintainer PoV, using newly-introduced macros only makes sense if they are available on all platforms I (might possibly) want to compile against, and for me at least, GA releases are part of that set.
I guess my initial question here is what is your usecase for building against GA explicitly?
Perhaps I want to be certain that the build result for my package works flawlessly on a fresh (i.e. GA) installation? What else would guarantee that?
From the point that GA is locked, nothing that would ever go to customers / end users is built against GA its all built against updates (which becomes GA for the next SP).
I'm aware of this policy, but I must say I have never understood it. Users are definitely not all running all the latest updates. If we built against GA, backward compatibility would guarantee that the built packages would work both on GA and on updated systems. But there are no forward-compatibility guarantees, so the opposite simply doesn't hold. Even if breakage rarely occurs in practice, it could occur any day.
In many cases building against updates / backports project addresses this issue, but yeah occasionally it doesn't and in those cases I also avoid using the macro (or take the 10 minutes to get it to SLE if i'm not rushing.
Sorry? 10 minutes to get it to SLE? How does that work? "10 months" sounds more realistic to me... please enlighten me. Martin