Re: 3.25.90 will probably be delayed

[mcatanzaro gnome org]

Hi developers,

I'm still struggling to get buildable release modulesets for 3.25.90. 
As you know, tarballs for that release were due Monday and the release 
was due Wednesday, but it's Saturday now and I haven't delivered it 
yet. Normally I spend about one day working on a release and it's not a 
big deal, but this time around there have been such a huge number of 
failures that it's taken all week. I can't understate how much worse 
this release has been than any I've ever worked on before.

I was hoping to finish up today, but it's just not going to happen. 
Normally all releases have an app or two that fails to build and we 
just mark them as skipped in the jhbuildrc that we release and roll 
with it. But right now, we have tricky outstanding build failures in 
low-level components [1][2] that I don't understand and which I have 
spent *far* too much time on already. This is a judgment call, but I 
think we're just not in a state to make our .90 beta release right now, 
since if we can't build it ourselves, distros probably won't be able to 
either. Please help fix these tricky issues and then we can see where 
we're at and decide how to adjust our schedule when they're fixed. I've 
uploaded tentative jhbuild modulesets [3] for smoketesting, so you can 
build with the exact same tarball versions and build flags that we 
release. You can use a command like this:

$ jhbuild -f sample-tarball.jhbuildrc -m gnome-apps-3.25.90.modules 
build

The good news is that a huge number of other build failures have 
already been fixed. In 80% of these cases the problem was already fixed 
in git and just needed a new tarball release. It's becoming too much 
effort to track down maintainers when releases are needed. When you 
make incompatible changes to your module or commit build fixes, it's 
important to follow the GNOME release cycle as otherwise it creates a 
big problem on release day when we can't build our tarballs against 
each other.

Michael

[1] https://github.com/hughsie/colord/issues/54
[2] https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/issues/212
[3] I've uploaded tentative jhbuild modulesets [3] for smoketesting, so 
you can build with the exact same tarball versions and build flags that 
we release.