On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:11 PM, Gilboa Davara <gilboad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> If Fesco is aiming at getting rid of all the pesky packagers maintaining low >> profile packages: You're well on your way. > > I usually stay away from mega-threads, but well put! > > I doubt that even major bug fixes in any of my (small) packages, ever > got more than 1-2 karma votes. Many got zero - not even a vote by the > original bug report owner! > > Why am I getting punished because some package didn't get enough testing > (due to the low visibility of update-testing?) before it was pushed into > -updates and caused breakage? > > Either we (package maintainers) are qualified to make sane decisions > about our package or we are not. I don't really see a middle ground > here. I thought I would add a few thoughts to this now long running thread. Firstly I have been a long standing - since Fedora Core 1 - user of Fedora, and in general Fedora Linux has served me well through many generations of new installs, across not only my own machines but also those of relatives/friends whom I have been trusted to convert to sole Linux use, up till now very successfully. There have been large changes in recent times (KDE 3.5->4, major changes to graphics drivers including open source Radeon/nouveau, major boot process updates, KMS, pulseaudio etc etc). We have survived all of those largely unscathed. I would hope that the machines that I run on behalf of other users will continue to serve them well through yum updates whilst in normal production service. I am lucky that I can run my main machines on a released and current version of Fedora that I expect will not fail in a catastrophic way after normal updates - but I do have available other non-critical machines on which I can run alpha or beta ( or even rawhide occasionally) versions, or run current releases but be prepared to take the risk of running unreleased packages from koji before they even hit bodhi, and before they reach testing repos. If these machines suffer in a major way it is not a disaster and I can re-install at worst - but the main production machines remain up and running (until recently that is!) I am lucky since I can usually find what fix is needed and sort it out. However Aunt Bessie can't and relies on people like me to fix their machines when their email stops working and a message appears on their screen saying something that is incomprehensible to her! Fine if it is only Aunt Bessie that I have to fix - but if Uncle Bob, Grandma Celine, Grandad David, and 25 other assorted friends, cousins and relatives all find their email stops one morning then I am going to be unable to do my dayjob if I spend all my time getting their machines all fixed because an update broke their production systems. At that level I would say that the update that caused that level of failure is no longer acceptable as a released update. I know that we are all human, and that occasionally we will all make a mistake (I do too!) but there is a threshold beyond which a failure is really not acceptable and once crossed there is a chance that users and testers will be alienated and move elsewhere. In that event I think the responsible person(s) should gracefully accept that a threshold has been crossed and learn from flack that ensues, even that has arisen from an upstream change that they were largely unaware would have serious consequences. Remember also that there are users who only have a single machine and if that breaks then it is much harder for him/her to sort out the problem if there is a loss of email functionality and/or loss of dns (remember the dnssec issue) leading to loss of network connectivity since getting the information required to fix it will need access to the net - so critical packages do need to be identified and tested at a more intense level than less critical packages. The kernel is also clearly critical and when dependencies on X and graphics drivers could break machines then that needs special consideration also. In general packages and their maintainers do a good job and we get regular excellent updated packages almost daily - what a service! - users of other alternatives to linux certainly don't get that level of provision or anything like it! I know that there has been a lot of soul searching and a genuine attempt to move forward - let's all keep level headed and try to be constructive rather than destructive in trying to make for a better Fedora. We have support that is truly up to date - let's keep it that way, but also avoid really serious breakage on production releases. -- mike c -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
