Re: The updates firehose

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 12:14 +0200, Neil Thompson wrote:

> 
> And very shortly you're going to be asking for a policy to be written which
> defines when the maintainers are going to be allowed to have bowel movements,
> aren't you?
> 
> The strengths of Fedora are its leading (even bleeding, at times) edge software
> and its maintainers.  I had hoped that the merge would lead to more freedom and
> faster throughput for new software, but it looks as though we're on the verge
> of a coup by anal, hide-bound, corporate control freaks. (<- hyperbole, but it
> worries me)
> 
> Please folks - if you're going to build a community, make sure that you have only
> the governance that is necessary and NO MORE!  Leave the maintainers (who have been
> appointed to look after the packages) to do their jobs.  Address mistakes and issues
> on a case-by-case basis and don't hamstring everyone with a bunch of pettifogging
> rules.

Ignoring the abusive language in the above, I think what we need is not
so much rules about what kind of updates are allowed, but a bit more
finegrained classification of updates, plus easy ways to filter by this
classification on the client side, and I mean some easy to use ui in
pup/pirut, not some manually installable and configurable yum plugin.

The current classification we have is just 
"bugfix - enhancement - security". It would be nice add some more
categories to this, like "cosmetic" (for minor packaging cleanups like
directory ownership handling), and some way to differentiate by
severity.