Delays in package processing

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Schwendt <mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam <at> arcor.de> writes:
> *I* believe we flood our users with too many rushed/untested updates. It
> feels more and more like a rolling release

A rolling release isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is not new 
software, it's unreliable software. Getting new stable software (such as 
upstream bugfix releases) in is a good thing. With Fedora, you get bugfixes and 
sometimes even new features very quickly, with a distribution doing security 
updates only (e.g. Debian stable) or almost (e.g. RHEL/CentOS), you often have 
to wait for months if not years to get a fix for your bug. Regressions are 
usually less of a problem than unfixed bugs: if there's a regression, I can 
rollback to the last working version, if there's an unfixed bug, there's 
nothing to upgrade or downgrade to.

> which is not too far away from Rawhide.

I separated out that part of the sentence because I disagree with the logic 
here. Are you seeing a major X.Org X11 upgrade with some regressions in F7/F8 
updates? KDE 4 RCs? A rewritten GDM? Yet all this stuff is in Rawhide. 
Maintainers _know_ what kind of upgrades are not stable enough and/or change 
too much to push as updates to stable releases. So, sure, the updates 
are "rolling", but they're a lot more reliable than Rawhide.

The main reason I like Fedora is because the releases are stable, yet up to 
date. I think we're doing a good job of separating the risky updates (-> 
Rawhide only) from the bugfix and/or riskless enhancement ones (-> updates).

> Certainly. Look at the size of the updates repository and also consider
> the number of packages, which have superseded eachother. Those users, who
> don't install a fresh Fedora release during the first two weeks, get to
> see several hundred updates the first time they run an update tool.

That's a feature.

> And after installing so many updates, they see regressions.

Our problem here is that updates-testing doesn't get enough actual testing, not 
the updates per se. And I think the occasional regression, while annoying, is 
not as bad as sitting on hundreds of bugs and leaving users with an unusable 
system for months.

> Plus packages that more often than necessary depend on eachother, because
> once again a "minor version update" of some library broke ABI compatibility
> and requires subsequent rebuilds of other packages.

IMHO that's a non-issue.

        Kevin Kofler