F11 Proposal: Stabilization

[Les Mikesell]

James Antill wrote:
> 
>> That may or may not be true and it may or may not matter.  All you need 
>> is some large representative sample doing the early testing and a way to 
>> ensure feedback to improve everyone's experience.  And letting users 
>> control their exposure to new bugs might increase the user base in both 
>> categories.
> 
>  This is what updates-testing _already does_. As Jesse has already said,
> there are two big problems:
> 
> 1. Too many people want to be consumers of the testing but not the
> providers of it.

I think that's an unwarranted assumption.  How many people even know 
about updates-testing compared to people that never change defaults? 
How does someone using updates-testing ensure that their usage 
'provides' something?

>  Indeed IMO the whole updates-tested argument seems to devolve to "I'm
> going to be clever and switch to this, but I'm pretty sure a bunch of
> other people aren't going to know immediately and so will become my
> unwilling testers".

No, the argument is this:
If I had a way to be moderately sure that my main work machine would be 
usable every day running fedora and I could test things on a less 
important machine, I'd be much more likely to run fedora more of the 
time and on more machines.

> 2. The people who are the providers of the testing, aren't necessarily
> running the same kinds of workloads as the people who want to just be
> consumers of the testing.

Exactly - it doesn't work that well as is.  And even if I wanted to test 
exactly the same work on exactly the same kind of machine, I don't think 
I could predictably 'consume' that testing value - that is, there is no 
way for me to know when or if a 'yum update' on my production machine is 
going to reproduce exactly the software installed on my test machine. 
(Personally I think this is a generic yum problem and it should provide 
an option for reproducible installs regardless of what is going on in 
the repositories, but that's a slightly different issue...).

> ...and to be fair, there are certainly improvements that could be done
> on the tools side to help people test and report, and the limited
> resources currently available are working to make that better. But,
> personally, I don't see how an updates-tested or updates-after-1-month
> etc. etc. is going to help in the long run. Sure, in the short term.
> it'll help all the people that know about it at the expense of those
> that don't ... but that isn't a good feature, IMO.

I think there will always be a mix of machines where testing is 
appropriate and desired and ones where more predictability is a 
requirement and often the same people will have have some of both types. 
  The question is whether it is possible for fedora to be appropriate to 
run on both.  If it isn't, I don't see much value to be obtained from 
the testing part.  If it is possible to manage the repos or updating 
tool to do the right thing for both environments without a lot of extra 
work, I think you'd see a big increase in both usage types.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com