Hi,
You`re asking a bigger question here - Who decides which distros/archs each project targets. The CI system currently places the burden of this decision on the shoulders of individual maintainers. We could have done things differently and placed the decision solely in the hands of the integration team.
Actually, I believe it should be a global decision of the project leadership. But I believe the word global to be important here. We should decide together and then a common version to platform map should be prepared by the integration team. Single projects could still add additional overrides if needed though.
The reason to placing the power (and responsibility) in the hands of maintainers we simple - we wanted to reduce the chances of having maintainers be surprised.
This actually means we get surprised and confused indeed. Please note that nobody really told us that Fedora bits are not going to be released anymore (see 4.2 release notes [1]) and whether we should update the job specifications or not.
Suppose we made it so that target distros change globally for everyone - you would have had patches failing CI at arbitrary times as new target distros or architectures were added...
Right. But we have something very similar now: spreadsheets with lists of packages that are missing from a new version compose. I do not see too much difference actually..
Personally I prefer that decisions remain distributed
I agree with who decides things (all of us). But the decision needs to be documented. Do we have any (easy to find) list of expected platforms for given a release? The decision then might be compiled into a file we could include and stay current without manual edits. [1] https://www.ovirt.org/release/4.2.0/#no-fedora-support Martin