One difficulty in developers using lsstsw is that we cannot force a rebuild. One of the great strengths of lsstsw for developers is being able to build the code in a set of repos on a particular tag; in this situation it is often more useful to the developers to have the code in the cloned repos rebuilt than have the code installed in the stack. But that can go terribly awry if one builds things in the wrong order, leaving a host of unbuilt git clones. For instance last night I did the following:

• rebuild a ticket
• rebuild master
  at that point my git clones were at master, when I wanted them on the ticket, and there was nothing I could think to do about it except start with a fresh stack (which is a major headache due to all the packages missing from lsstsw). I am still digging out of the mess.

Of course forced rebuild is useful for other situations, as well, such as confirming that we can build the stack. Some packages have intermittent build errors and doing an occasional fresh build is often the only way to catch those.