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

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 01:26:35AM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 18:51 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 11:48:04PM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> >On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 23:20 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> >> Le mercredi 10 décembre 2008 à 22:46 +0100, Ralf Corsepius a écrit :
>> >> 
>> >> > ... then wait until your immature and hardly tested "new code" from
>> >> > "rawhide" automatically becomes the "release".
>> >> > 
>> >> > FC10 clearly demonstrates this effect.
>> >> 
>> >> I don't think this is fair to releng and the QA teams. 
>> >Why is this not fair? The technical facts on FC10 speak for themselves: 
>> >Rawhide and Fedora's release procedures as means for "Fedora release
>> >preparation testing" don't work out.
>> 
>> Examples of this? 
>
>Some random examples, which I have been hit myself:
>

<snip>

>To me, 
>* the gnome-session, evolution and PackageKit examples are cases
>demonstrating how "bugged SW", which should never have been made part of
>a release, migrates from rawhide into releases.
>* all 4 cases are demonstrating that rawhide as a release testing
>platform doesn't work out.

I'd exclude the kernel bug from that summary.  As for the others, I came
to the startling realization that I don't use any of the other 3 packages
at all because I generally either have no use for them or found them to
be buggy in the past and gave up on them (like evolution).

Which is sort of an agreement with you in some regards.  However I also
think one needs to keep in mind that for the majority of packages Fedora
gets what upstream delivers.  Fortunately, most of the upstreams we have
seem to be pretty good about fixing bugs as they are found.  QA can't find
them all, and I think your efforts here show exactly _why_ we need people
like you doing the bug reporting you are.

>Wrt. rel-eng:
>
>Besides the numerous NEVR issues between Fedora release, which FC10 (as
>usual) suffers from, this time another kind of repo screw up took place:

NEVR issues not getting caught are due to two things:  1) package maintainers
not paying attention, and 2) the lack of dep and upgrade path checking in
bodhi.

Number 2 is a rel-eng/infrastructure issue that is being worked on although
somewhat slowly.  Number 1 is something we need the maintainers to start
being accountable for.  Prevention after the fact is never better than being
proactive and cautious about what the maintainers are updating.

>updates/10 contains packages with an older NEVR than Everything and
>Fedora, e.g.:
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/smolt-1.1.1.1-9.fc10.noarch.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/smolt-server-1.1.1.1-9.fc10.noarch.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kazehakase-base-0.5.6-1.fc10.1.i386.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kazehakase-webkit-0.5.6-1.fc10.1.i386.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kazehakase-hyperestraier-0.5.6-1.fc10.1.i386.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kazehakase-0.5.6-1.fc10.1.i386.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/smolt-firstboot-1.1.1.1-9.fc10.noarch.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kazehakase-ruby-0.5.6-1.fc10.1.i386.rpm
>releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/smolt-gui-1.1.1.1-9.fc10.noarch.rpm
>updates/10/i386/kazehakase-webkit-0.5.6-1.fc10.i386.rpm
>updates/10/i386/kazehakase-hyperestraier-0.5.6-1.fc10.i386.rpm
>updates/10/i386/smolt-firstboot-1.1.1.1-8.fc10.noarch.rpm
>updates/10/i386/smolt-server-1.1.1.1-8.fc10.noarch.rpm
>updates/10/i386/smolt-1.1.1.1-8.fc10.noarch.rpm
>updates/10/i386/kazehakase-0.5.6-1.fc10.i386.rpm
>updates/10/i386/kazehakase-base-0.5.6-1.fc10.i386.rpm
>updates/10/i386/smolt-gui-1.1.1.1-8.fc10.noarch.rpm
>updates/10/i386/kazehakase-ruby-0.5.6-1.fc10.i386.rpm
>
>Admitted, this is a minor issue without impact on users, nevertheless it
>raises questions.

I don't know why that happened.  My best guess would be something like:
"An update was staged and then something happened that caused a newer
package to be pulled into the final release.  The maintainer forgot
about the pending update."

Again, no real clue though.

>>  Do you have bug report numbers, regression cases,
>> or any sort of data saying things are getting worse from a release
>> stability perspective?
>> 
>> I'm not saying you're wrong, but statements without facts are hard
>> to swallow.  If we're sucking it up, point us to where and how so
>> things can be fixed.  I have F10 on a number of machines and it's
>> working fine, so my personal experience may be different than yours.
>Let me put it this way: I have been running machines equipped with FC10
>since ca. Beta2, and am busy filing bugs since then. I haven't been
>bookkeeping, but it's in the order of 0.5-1 per day.

0.5-1 per day after release, or as an average over the time since Beta2?
Also, across a subset of packages or just in random things as you hit
them?

I know you aren't keeping track, but data like that would be useful to
indentify bug trends and problem packages.  I'm not asking you to actually
go answer those questions, but it's something the bug zappers could think
about.

josh