CI Requirements - Lessons Not Learnt?

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am 2017-01-12 17:13, schrieb Luca Beltrame:
> Il giorno Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:53:18 +0100
> Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> ha scritto:
> 
>> If you do nevertheless, my upstream position is GO FUCK YOURSELF! It
>> will mean that I will directly close every bug report we get from
>> Fedora with RESOLVED DOWNSTREAM, "Cannot investigate, Fedora patched
> 
> OK, things are a little out of hand here... I would suggest people to
> cool off and wait before things get even worse than this.
> 
> I asked Sysadmin to put kde-core-devel in emergency moderation (but
> it's at their discretion to do so or not). I would suggest (and yes, 
> I'm
> a bad preacher here, because I'm following up) to stop a bit before
> going on with this discussion (if we want this to keep being a
> discussion).
> 
> Remember: even if we have disagreements (even strong), we're all on the
> same side.

I fully agree. Nevertheless the steam had to go out.

Let me explain: I'm extremely pissed by all of this. For weeks now I 
have to justify and explain why I upgraded a dependency. People, come 
on. I have now been KWin maintainer for about six years. Yes I know that 
this:
* causes issues for other developers
* means it cannot be backported to older distributions
* means the CI breaks

I'm a developer who works extremely intensively with the CI. I have a 
custom page on build.kde.org with all the projects I maintain. I have 
the RSS feed synced to all my devices. I see immediately if a build 
breaks or a test fails.

After pushing the xkbcommon change the first thing I did, was go into 
the reported bug for Neon and told them that the dependency I asked for 
is now required. A few minutes later my RSS feed yelled at me with 
"broken build". My reaction was OH FUCK! I investigated and asked 
sysadmins to provide the dependency. This was between Christmas and New 
Year. Yeah there are other things to care about in that time. I'm sorry 
that I forgot to notify sysadmins before. After all I did for neon. 
Sorry, my fault.

Immediately after the push, it started that people questioned the 
change. Why did you have to update. Can you not use xkbcommon 0.6. Does 
it need to be that one. At the same time every build fails on 
build.kde.org.

And then this email thread. When it started I was already extremely 
pissed about the situation. It was wasting my time. Yes KWin needs this 
stupid dependency, if not I would not have put it in. If it were an 
option to make it optional, I would have done it, like in so many other 
cases. But this one is really super, super important.

All this questioning, all this why don't you ifdef, feels like an 
extreme distrust in my decision as a maintainer. People telling me how I 
should maintain KWin. Fine, then do the work! I'm not threatening to 
step down as KWin maintainer. I'm offering anyone to take the job. If 
someone thinks he can do better, go for it! I will not stand in the way.

And this attitude of Kevin here, that is too much for me. As a distro to 
be willing to patch out changes, to deliberately break software, after 
all this discussion. All this again and again that this is really a 
change which we cannot ifdef. That's unbelievable to me. I am quite 
aware that I overstepped here. This is showing a huge distrust in my 
capabilities as a maintainer. Apparently I'm not able to decide whether 
a dependency is required or not. Kevin and Fedora knows better. This is 
very disappointing to me. And well as said: I'm extremely pissed of all 
this mess, just because I upgraded xkbcommon.

I'm wasting time I could use to fix things, to improve wayland support. 
Instead I have to explain why we need a newer xkbcommon. I'm sure the 
GNOME Wayland team doesn't have to go through this bullshit with Fedora. 
They even get the unreleased Xwayland. But KDE, no, no, you shall not 
have xkbcommon to use the new API flag which is called FOO_GTK2, because 
Fedora devs don't want it.

Sorry, about that.

Martin