F11 Proposal: Stabilization

James Antill james at fedoraproject.org
Wed Nov 19 16:34:25 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 09:51 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 10:03 +0200, shmuel siegel wrote:
> >> I am not sure that you are right. The audience for updates tested might 
> >> very well be bigger than the one for updates testing. For example, I 
> >> always started using rawhide at test2, never at test1. Test1 was viewed 
> >> as pre-alpha and just too raw for someone who wanted a system that 
> >> basically worked but had some bugs.
> > 
> > I think you just described the problem again.  The audience for "updates
> > tested" is going to be far larger than the audience for 'updates' or
> > 'updates-testing', meaning that stuff isn't /really/ going to be tested
> > until it gets to that 'updates-tested' set of folks, which kind of
> > defeats the purpose.
> 
> That may or may not be true and it may or may not matter.  All you need 
> is some large representative sample doing the early testing and a way to 
> ensure feedback to improve everyone's experience.  And letting users 
> control their exposure to new bugs might increase the user base in both 
> categories.

 This is what updates-testing _already does_. As Jesse has already said,
there are two big problems:

1. Too many people want to be consumers of the testing but not the
providers of it.
 Indeed IMO the whole updates-tested argument seems to devolve to "I'm
going to be clever and switch to this, but I'm pretty sure a bunch of
other people aren't going to know immediately and so will become my
unwilling testers".

2. The people who are the providers of the testing, aren't necessarily
running the same kinds of workloads as the people who want to just be
consumers of the testing.

...and to be fair, there are certainly improvements that could be done
on the tools side to help people test and report, and the limited
resources currently available are working to make that better. But,
personally, I don't see how an updates-tested or updates-after-1-month
etc. etc. is going to help in the long run. Sure, in the short term.
it'll help all the people that know about it at the expense of those
that don't ... but that isn't a good feature, IMO.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora




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