Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time

Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by mjg59 on Friday February 19, 2016 @12:39PM (#11134998)

> But if they have a script, or even just a "building.txt" that says "install gcc 4.4 and set these environment variables, build is broken on 5.x, known issue", and they exclude that from their source distribution then they're in violation.

They don't.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by lmm on Friday February 19, 2016 @12:49PM (#11135069)

Really? They being Canonical? They just build their binaries with whatever happens to be installed on Bob's machine this week and then that becomes their official release?

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by mjg59 on Friday February 19, 2016 @02:36PM (#11135974)

They build their packages with whatever is in the distribution at the time, yes. It happens on the build daemons rather than on the developer machine.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by lmm on Friday February 19, 2016 @04:28PM (#11136763)

Then how can you get into the situation that the shipped binary packages can't be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies - isn't that what the build daemons do, use the system to build itself? I mean if they use the previous release or something that's fine too. Whichever way they do it, surely it's documented internally, because it's the kind of thing developers would need to know when developing. I can't believe it would be a case of "if the build doesn't build ssh into the build daemons and update them until it does".

I mean a developer working at Canonical, trying to make a change to one of the packages they're preparing for distribution, has to have some way to answer the question "what version of gcc is being used to build this package". Whether that information is kept in the source tree, on their wiki, or on a post-it on the employee fridge - in any case, it's part of the source in the preferred form for making modifications, because it's, well, part of what the employees use to make modifications.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by mjg59 on Friday February 19, 2016 @06:38PM (#11137634)

> Then how can you get into the situation that the shipped binary packages can't be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies

The distribution isn't rebuilt every cycle. If no new source release has been uploaded, the existing binary will be used for the next release.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by lmm on Sunday February 21, 2016 @03:45AM (#11143825)

So if they need to apply a small patch to a given package they'll sometimes discover that it was built 3 versions ago and no longer compiles? Yuck.

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by nkurz on Friday February 19, 2016 @05:51PM (#11137348)

Then how can you get into the situation that the shipped binary packages can't be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies

I think that Matthew might be suggesting that not all packages are rebuilt with every release? A binary package might be compiled with GCC-4, then the distribution is upgraded to GCC-5, dropping GCC-4. If for some reason the package is not compatible with the new compiler, you would then be in a situation where the binary cannot be recreated from source without outside tools. Do you know if Canonical recompiles everything on each update to the toolchain?

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Re:Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All... by lmm on Monday February 22, 2016 @04:51AM (#11149708)

I have no specific knowledge about Canonical's processes. I'm just amazed that a serious software company in 2016 wouldn't have a reproducible build process for their primary product.

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