CI Requirements - Lessons Not Learnt?

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

It seems that my previous vocal complaints about system level /
serious impact dependency bumps on the CI system have gone completely
unnoticed by (some) members of our Community.

This was demonstrated earlier this week when components of Plasma
bumped their version requirements for XKBCommon and Appstream-Qt -
without even a thought about notifying Sysadmin or checking which
version the CI had, until their builds broke.

Neither of these is easy to fix at this stage, as the system base is
now too old to receive updates such as these. Base upgrades require a
full rebuild of everything on the CI system, and usually involve
significant additional churn and is a process that must be done
roughly twice a year, depending on dependency bump demands.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we may avoid this in the future?

At this point i'm in favour of if you don't follow the rules your
dependency bump just gets reverted out of existence, then you get to
go through the process properly...

Regards,
Ben