On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 11:15 -0500, Jarod Wilson wrote: > On Friday 07 March 2008 10:51:25 am Benjamin Kreuter wrote: > > On Thursday 06 March 2008 19:29:23 Chuck Ebbert wrote: > > > Sorry, we had to release with known bugs. A new kernel will be in > > > updates-testing very shortly. > > > > Why did you have to release with known bugs? Why not just wait until the > > bugs are fixed? The last three kernel updates broke suspend for me... > > Uh... If we waited until all the known bugs were fixed, we'd never release > *any* kernel... :) > > Despite this kernel making my own iwl4965 unusable, I was fully in favor of > releasing it. In theory, we fixed more problems than we caused, and you're > always welcome to keep running the prior kernel. (I'm actually running a > slightly modified 2.6.24.2-7.fc8 now). Yes, the real issue here is not all bugs, but regressions. Regressions are a major problem for Aunt Tillie. Kernel regressions can result in an unbootable, unusable system. I can't imagine ever deploying Fedora on Aunt Tillie's machine for exactly this reason, kernel regressions. Use case: Aunt Tillie diligently keeps her Fedora machine up to date. A new kernel results in a regression with her hardware. Maybe it doesn't even boot. What does she do? Can we really expect her to know how to boot the previous kernel? How is she to even know it is the kernel that broke? Does she even know what a kernel is? How does she fix it? Booting the old kernel in GRUB is a one time deal. How does she make it stick? How does she blacklist the broken kernel? What does she do when 6 more broken kernels come through the update pipe? What do *I* do to prevent this? Tell her to not update, and risk security issues? Should I have blacklisted updating the kernel before leaving her alone with the machine? Which still leaves the kernel potentially vulnerable. This is not theoretical, I ran into this very kind of problem in F7. F7 ran perfectly, initially. A kernel update (a bump from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22, mind you...) resulted in a reboot loop on my wife's eMachines m6805 (x86_64) laptop. I even bugzilled it right away, though bugzilla's wonderous search functionality is refusing to find it right now. Many months and many kernel updates went by, all of them broken. It finally got fixed when the bug was discovered in the rawhide kernel and ended up on the F8 release blocker list. This is a terrible user experience for *me*, let alone Aunt Tillie. I can't imagine subjecting Aunt Tillie to this without help. Now, I'm not saying I have the solution to this, and I'm not saying the solution is easy. But IMHO this really needs to be addressed, somehow, if Fedora is to ever truly be "ready for the desktop".
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