Broken deps in the stable release are not acceptable

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 02:27:53AM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> 
> Am Samstag, den 29.12.2007, 01:09 +0000 schrieb Kevin Kofler:
> > Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert <at> nurfuerspam.de> writes:
> > > You are right. I thought we already had policy for that but the wiki
> > > says:
> > > "If you feel that community testing is unnecessary for your update, you
> > > can choose to push it straight to the stable fedora-updates repository
> > > instead."
> > > 
> > > IMO this is wrong, it should only be allowed for security updates.
> > 
> > It should also stay allowed for critical regression fixes at the very least. 
> > Unfortunately, sometimes updates slip through testing despite causing serious 
> > issues. For example, an SDL update caused _any_ build against SDL-devel to fail 
> > (because SDL-config.h was corrupted by a trivial typo in the specfile which was 
> > missed during testing). We really want the fix to such regressions to go to 
> > stable as quickly as possible, not to have to go to testing first.
> 
> I completely agree with you. Maybe we could say that updates are allowed
> to bypass testing if they fix
> a) serious bugs
> b) bugs marked as "urgent"
> c) broken deps
> 
> For c) I think only plain rebuilds should be allowed. If the broken deps
> are fixed by updating to a newer version the new package should be
> tested again, at least for one or two days.

For fixing broken deps its reasonable to bypassing testing, since the
assuption is the current package is already un-installable.  Bugs marked
'urgent' is a complete waste of time - everyone thinks their own bug
is urgent / important. If someone enters a BZ and marks it urgent I'll
typically put it at the bottom of my TODO list because it usually isn't
urgent at all ;-P   Similarly 'serious bug' is kind of hard to define as
a formal policy - you need to enumerate a reasonable set of scenarios
which are considered serious. 'broken deps' is one good example of a
serious bug.

Dan.
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