Delays in package processing

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:17:33 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> >>> [...] 
> >>> *I* believe we flood our users with too many rushed/untested updates. It
> >>> feels more and more like a rolling release which is not too far away from
> >>> Rawhide.
> >> I think a kind of rolling release is something good -- especially as
> >> hardware-support in Linux is not done by separate drivers (like on
> >> Windows) and instead often bound to packages (like the linux kernel,
> >> sane, or hpijs). Thus is we IMHO want new version of those packages in
> >> the repo to support new hardware instead of forcing them to use rawhide
> >                                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >> or waiting up to six month until the next release.
> >      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > Hyperbole. There may be feature additions in updates, provided that they
> > are subject to a reasonable amount of testing.
> 
> Thx for your kind and friendly words.

Where do you see unkind or unfriendly words? "Hyperbole" is just another
word for "exaggeration", and above you did exactly that. You exaggerated
by a clear margin. Actually, all those people who can't install F8 from
media due to various problems (with unsupported hardware, undetected
drives, kernel problems e.g.) are sort of forced to wait for the next
release, which is after ~6 months. Unless there's a respin which
incorporates anaconda/kernel/...  updates that fixes the people's
problems. And not many are courageous enough to try rawhide.

> Sorry, you are barking up the wrong tree. 

No, I'm not. It's the same procedure as usual. I point out my concerns,
and I'm not the only one who does that. Fedora, IMO, is becoming less
attractive due to an overwhelming number of updates. Every update that
doesn't just fix specific bugs (as in good old Red Hat Errata) bears the
risk of breaking because of new bugs or incompatible changes. Recently,
I've been hit by several bugs after applying updates without that I've
done anything to the system myself. Something damaged my gnome panels,
sound stopped working, gnome mixer caused trouble, the rushed k3b update
broke dvd backups, occasionally the desktop stopped working until I
pressed Alt+Tab, liferea became unreliable. Just some examples. Reason
enough to reinstall.

I don't want to make it more difficult for packagers to publish updates --
quality updates, well-tested packages which include accumulated bug-fixes.
But, please, don't engage in those mad upgrade races with upstream
projects and move away from the gold release of the distribution just to
ship new stuff. It's like a never-ending loop in the development/testing
cycle. An unstoppable stream of new packages which you need to evaluate
and test against the packages which you use and build your own packages
with.