I’ve not done a rawhide post in a few weeks because there wasn’t much interesting going on. I finally had a few things this last week, so here’s another installment. 😉
Last week there was a libicu bump in rawhide. It’s always a bit of fun when a library that many things depend on changes it’s ABI (It’s 58 or so packages). In this case the maintainer announced things well in advance, but I at least missed that they were not themselves a provenpackager or had one (or more) lined up to rebuild things. This caused the usual churn while maintainers and provenpackagers got things rebuilt. It also showed another issue that happens from time to time in rawhide: something changes and you need to rebuild your package, so you do, but discover that a earlier change in tools causes it to not rebuild. This happened to the open-vm-tools package. It needed rebuilding for the icu bump, but when the rebuild was done, it was discovered that a glib2 change a while back actually silently made it not build.
Rawhide these days produces a boot.iso every day (unless it fails). For a week or so it was producing the image fine, but it turns out that it was not functional. Several folks tried and the network wasn’t working. dhclient on the image would fail to run due to a missing library. I looked at dependencies and changes and took a while to find out that lorax (the tool that makes the boot.iso) cleans out some libraries that aren’t needed (To save space I assume). This bind library was one of those and removing that was causing the dhclient failure. By the time I had tracked it down, there was already a fix in lorax upstream and a new lorax build the next day to fix it. This teaches us several things: Just because boot.iso is created does not mean it works, and please do report bugs when you see them. A number of people saw this issue, but no one tracked it down or filed a bug until a week or so later. ;(
Finally, observant folks might notice that there was no rawhide compose today. The compose process failed with a traceback in yum. There’s a likely change that might have caused the issue, so that change was reverted and I restarted the rawhide compose. There may yet be one today. 🙂
Stay tuned for more exciting adventures of rawhide…