However as noted in my post on f-d-l: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00367.html there should definitely be a few exceptions to the rule of announcement if maintainer performing the breakage, either:

1. owns all the affected packages and is planning to rebuild them, or

2. is a provenpackager/co-maintainer, or otherwise has access and who is intending to rebuild all affected packages (e.g. xulrunner/firefox).

In those cases, a heads-up on f-d-l might be nice, but probably not mandatory (although even in thoses cases there may be dependent packages that the maintainer is not aware of).

It was suggested on the list that this may be unnecessary and that it would be better for maintainers of packages that are affected to simply e-mail the dependent package maintainers directly. Although I agree that would also be a good idea, it's often difficult to find out exactly which packages are affected. It is possible to run repoquery to find those packages in most cases, but:

1. most maintainers are unaware of, or do not use repoquery regularly (even though they probably should)

2. even if repoquery is run, it does not necessarily collect all affected packages. In some cases these ABI changes have an effect beyond the immediate list of packages that repoquery will list. e.g. an update of the mono stack may affect a large number of packages and overall distro integration beyond what can be expressed by package deps.

I still think mailing f-d-a makes the most sense (with the exceptions noted above). ABI/soname breakage are exactly the kind of thing that it is worth bringing to attention to the greater Fedora community, which is what f-d-a was intended to solve.

This proposal was rejected at the 2009/03/13 FESCo meeting. It was felt that while the current system is far from perfect, this felt a little heavy-handed.