[ovirt-devel] [ACTION REQUIRED] fixing CI on FC27 and RAWHIDE

[Barak Korren]

Hi to all maintainers,

TL;DR: If you use yum-utils on fedora (For e.g using yum-builddep) you
need to switch to dnf-utils.

As you may know we had encountered many issues when trying to get CI
to work well for FC27 and Fedora RAWHIDE.

One of the main reasons for the issues we've seen was that we were
using 'yum' instead of 'dnf' to setup Fedora build and test
environments. In FC27 and RAWHIDe, some packages simply stopped being
compatible with yum.

It took us a while to resolve this since we needed to get some patches
merged upstream to the tools we use, but since yesterday we switched
to using DNF for setting up FC environments.

While we were waiting for the tools to get patched, our work-around
was to freeze the mirrors our CI system uses so that newer and
incompatible packages were invisible in CI. Since we now have a fix in
place we started re-syncing our mirrors to get newer packages.

A side effect of this, is that dnf-incompatible code in build and test
scripts was exposed. One such common case is scripts using
'yum-builddep' with 'yum-utils' installed instead of 'dnf-utils'. In
this case yum-incompatible packages will fail to be downloaded.

Bottom line - if you use yum-based tools in your build/test scripts,
they need to be changed to dnf-based tools when those scripts run in
Fedora. Sometime this can be as simple as changing the packages listed
in your *.packages files for Fedora.

See for example this patch which switches from yum-utils to dnf-utils:
https://gerrit.ovirt.org/c/88630/

-- 
Barak Korren
RHV DevOps team , RHCE, RHCi
Red Hat EMEA
redhat.com | TRIED. TESTED. TRUSTED. | redhat.com/trusted