Why are 4.8.80 packages already out in the wild?

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Monday 04 June 2012 15:18:11 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> On Monday 04 June 2012, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > That means that people report bugs against different incarnations of the
> > same packages, which makes bugs hard to find -- it doesn't work as we
> > can't verify the exact state of the code a bug is filed against.
> 
> That almost never makes a difference in practice, and when it does, the
> developers are (or should be) aware of the respin and ask to make sure. (If
> the reporter is the packager, he/she'll definitely know whether the package
> already uses a respun tarball, if not, he/she can provide the exact version
> of the distro package and the distro packager can tell you what tarball was
> used. And in any case, we always issue a new build with the respun tarball
> as soon as possible.)
I must admit that I find your answer strange. Given that the whole thread had 
been started by a developer because he sees a problem in exactly that thing, 
it's quite strange that I get told that there is no problem at all.

Please note that working as a developer is quite different to working as a 
distro packager. Yes your distro packages have very precise versions, yes our 
versions, too - once they are released. And that's the difference to the 
distro packages, before the release it is not known what the version is. (Btw. 
shipping patches upstream does not know about is as bad - even in development 
versions nobody should use).

Now what appears to be no problem is a problem. It is causing work for 
developers when the version information is wrong. It is causing work if we 
have to ask again for the version information. Furthermore it is not said that 
a developer knows about a respin tarball. Please note that unlike you, I as a 
developer have no access to the tarball before release and the developers 
don't get a mail in their inbox telling them that the tarball has been 
recreated. Developers have to actively monitor the release team mailinglist 
and I'm quite sure that not everybody is subsribed to this list.

The whole thing becomes even more complex if we consider the perfect case of 
bug triaging. How should a triager know that the developers fixed a bug which 
caused a respin of the package?

I hope you understand that what you describe as a non-issue, is issue enough 
that I started the thread. So yeah either I have no clue about what I do, or 
maybe, maybe it is an issue in fact.

Cheers
Martin
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