Desktop Proposal

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Mon Oct 12 16:22:50 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 10:42 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> This is not what updates testing is for.  Stuff in updates testing for F11
> is for packages that are, ultimately, destined for F-11.  The experimental
> repo for F-11 would be for packages that are destined for F-12 if at all.

Isn't that what rawhide is for?  If you're on F11, but want to test
experimental stuff, well install it from rawhide.  You'll get to keep
all the pieces.  If we're concerned about quality, I really don't think
adding some weird mashup repos to the mix is going to help that at all.
The more repos you throw out there, the more complex an environment may
be and the complexity of the test matrix exponentially increases.

> 
> Additionally stuff "working" in testing and being pushed to stable is the
> problem.  The firefox example is a good example of this as is the
> thunderbird update mentioned on fedora-devel.  Thunderbird should never
> have been pushed to F-11 under this proposal.  The new thunderbird would
> be released and updated in the experimental repo.  The old thunderbird
> would continue to get updates in F-11 proper. 

This makes a big set of assumptions.  A) the developer had foresight
enough to see late changing highly disruptive UI changes in the future
for the build.  B) The beta period for thunderbird would last beyond the
development period for Fedora 11.  C) the developer had foresight enough
to see that the older thunderbird code would remain usable and keep
getting bug fixes.  None of these is terribly good assumptions to make.

In the particular thunderbird case, I think this whole mess would have
been avoided if the maintainer had simply patched the F11 build to
retain the previous UI defaults, while enabling the choice for
interested people to experiment with the new options.  The F12 (or F13
build by now) build would enable the new UI by default to match
upstream.  I really don't think we need to create a ton of extra repos
and logistics issues to avoid a maintainer having to think a little bit
about what it is they're updating and how it will effect users.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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