What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Les Mikesell]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It could be as simple as batching updates: suppose everything but critical
>> security fixes and corrections for known-bad updates only updated every few
>> weeks, and the user could could choose (with a permanent option) whether any
>> particular machine should update on the leading or trailing edge of this
>> window.
> 
> 1) Couldn't you get most of what you want by having a yum plugin that
> deliberately held back updates which were too new for your local
> administration needs? if package build/release datestamps were
> available in the repository metadata? We already have the security and
> bugfix flags in the metadata.

Maybe, but the repos would still have to have overlapping package sets 
and the yum plugin would have to be able to distinguish between a new 
'feature-update' package that it should defer and a fix to the last 
version that it should accept.   And it doesn't do much for the case 
where I find an issue on the test machine that doesn't get fixed before 
the normal time to accept updates on the critical ones.

> 2) 'known bad' assumes we actually know that updates are bad before we
> release them. If we knew they were bad we wouldn't release them at
> all.

Known-bad in this scenario means detected after the initial rollout but 
before the end of the window to the next 'new code' push.  Being able to 
   avoid those and get the fixed version instead on your critical 
machines would make using fedora a lot more practical.

>> Or, pick a time frame reasonable both for mirrors to hold updates and for
>> users to complete testing (2 months?) and only remove packages after their
>> replacements have reached that age.
>>
>> Or, what if one machine's yum automatically acted as a proxy for another's
>> update, perhaps with an error generated if the package hadn't been
>> downloaded already and if you want to be even more helpful, a warning if
>> none of the code from a package had been run on the intermediate machine?
> 
> Feel free to take over InstantMirror and extend it
> https://fedorahosted.org/InstantMirror/

I think that's pretty far from what I'd want to happen.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com