alpha/beta software in Fedora 8?

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Mon Dec 10 14:10:34 UTC 2007


Hi,

Sorry, I don't think we are quite done flogging this one

http://www.bittermancircle.com/my%20images/BeatDeadHorse.gif

:)

On Friday 30 November 2007 10:35:57 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Steve Grubb <sgrubb <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > How about unreleased cvs snapshots? kdepim in F7 failed to work after a
> > recent upgrade (and had been working fine) and my problem was only solved
> > by upgrading to F8 which had a more recent cvs snapshot that is still
> > buggy but
>
> I'll sched some light on the situation of kdepim:
>
> Basically, the problem is that the last really stable release of kdepim,
> especially KMail, was 3.5.6. When we upgraded KDE to 3.5.7, we were hit by
> 2 serious regressions in KMail IMAP filtering, which made IMAP filters
> essentially unusable (one of them broke automatic filtering and one manual
> filtering). The bugs were reported upstream, but nobody knew how to fix
> automatic filtering in 3.5.7. This situation persisted for weeks. At that
> point other distributions (at least openSUSE and Kubuntu, probably more)
> started shipping kdepim from the enterprise branch, so we tried that, and
> found in our testing that it fixed the KMail IMAP regressions. However,
> nobody upstream knew how to backport whatever made it work in the
> enterprise branch to the regular 3.5 branch, nor did we. So, given how many
> complaints we got about those IMAP regressions (complaints of the "you
> broke my KMail" type, which weren't unreasonable given what happened), we
> decided to rush the enterprise branch update as an F7 update so this gets
> finally fixed, as no other fix was in sight.

I think I would have voted for sitting on the current package.  The enterprise 
branch is very, very different. 


> (We considered reverting kdepim to 3.5.6, but there were other changes in
> 3.5.7 we didn't want to revert, e.g. in KitchenSync.) 

You can't - literally. KDE modifies its configuration. You would need the old 
config saved away on a per version directory.


> The current situation is now that:
> * the newer snapshot which fixes your problems will be pushed to Fedora 7
> updates (or already was? Which snapshot fixed your problems? 

I had to upgrade to F8 to fix my problem. The one in F8 crashes anytime the 
imap server is slow and you start clicking around on other mails to see if 
anything is alive. I've filed a bz on this, too.


> > usable. Rolling back did not work. The only support I got by the Fedora
> > maintainer was telling me to report it upstream. Upstream does not
> > support it because its a cvs snapshot and not a released version.
>
> Upstream really should support it because 1. it's scheduled to be merged
> into the next release and 2. it's being shipped by several distros.


OK, here is what upstream said:

>> 1) Is this (kdepim-enterprise-svn20070926.tar.bz2) an officially 
>> supported release? 
>
>No, it says "svn" which means it was a development snapshot.
>We do have some snapshots which we consider good for testing
>which which some people use in production (as testing) and packagers
>might want to pick up for the "test" builds, check
>http://apt.intevation.de/dists/etch/unstable/source/

Question: are we using this as our source? Should we sync up with their 
recommendations?


>> 2) How much testing goes into a tarball like this before a release?
>
>We did not release this tarball, it seems to have been a snapshot
>quality control depends on the one who created it.
>
>The ones that you can find in the mentioned "unstable" apt directory above
>have seen internal testing. This consists of testing towards the new feature
>and a basic test that covers some core functionality.

So if we pick a random day to get a cvs snapshot, we are completely on our 
own.


>> 3) Did you make any kind of announcement that this was ready to be used 
>> by end users?
>
>No.

Observation: Since they are not announcing anything about a feature being 
complete, a snapshot on a random day could catch something half patched.


>> 4) Is this release stable enough for a business to run on?
>
>I cannot say, it depends who created the snapshot
>and what promisses were made for it. Probably not.

So, if you use Fedora's kmail, the upstream *developers* say it not stable 
enough to use for production. By taking snaps on random days, we are on our 
own. I rest my case....

-Steve




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