182 pending F11 stable updates. WTF?

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Sat May 9 10:45:14 UTC 2009


On Fri, 8 May 2009 09:46:13 -0700, Ray wrote:

> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 05:14:08PM +0100, Tim Waugh wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 16:45 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > For new packages, it's surely better to have a new crap package than
> > > no package at all.
> > 
> > When a package claims to do something but is actually no good at it, it
> > can cause real frustration to those who just want to use the computer
> > and not develop for it.
> > 
> > I would much rather the software that goes into a Fedora release be of
> > release quality, starting from the time the package review is finished,
> > or not be in it at all.
> > 
> > Is it just me?
>
> I think there should be enough trust in the packagers to make the
> decision as to whether or not a "new" package is ready or not for
> consumption.
> 
> Ray
> 

We're back at where we've been long ago. It's good to not take away the
freedom. It's good to trust the packagers. It's good that packagers may
decide for themselves whether to skip updates-testing.

Unfortunately, if they skip updates-testing actually, this reduces the
community's opportunity to contribute testing.

They exclude the few people who are willing to enable updates-testing or
who cherry-pick test updates. These people need a few days for mirrors to
sync, a few days to evaluate updates, and additional time to decide on
what feedback to give. [1]

Instead, updates marked as stable immediately are unleashed onto users who
may not want to be guinea pigs. Users, who might be actual users of your
packages, but who might not be familiar with the Fedora Updates System
website and its karma system. Users, who expect package maintainers to not
release broken updates. Don't expect such users to search for the bodhi
website and to hunt down broken updates in a flood of tickets. Hope that
they take the time to report problems in bugzilla instead of rolling on
with their own builds, downgrades, or a different dist.

What happens in bodhi is that packagers give +1 on their own updates, not
noticing broken deps, not noticing other packaging problems, in some cases
not even trying to install an update prior to marking it stable. Other
packagers, for example, are not familiar with the releng procedures. They
push ABI-incompatible upgrades into stable in order to rebuild dependencies.
One cannot say the Fedora Project Wiki is easy to navigate. It's really
easy to miss such details and to miss changes on pages and in procedures.

With regard to new packages added to the collection, Fedora is focused on
quantity instead of quality. The fight against the review-queue leads to
metrics (who does the most reviews per week?) while nobody measures the
quality of the reviews and the quality of the released packages. One can
only hope that poor reviews of simple packages like bug 494852 will be
avoided in the future.


[1] Skipping updates-testing also removes the opportunity to run scripts
that check remote repositories. The excuse that the build system should
run such tests at the end of a build-job is lame.




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