F11 Proposal: Stabilization

[James Antill]

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 14:26 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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? 

 Certainly everyone in this thread knows about it.

> How does someone using updates-testing ensure that their usage 
> 'provides' something?

 bodhi -k +1 -c 'pkg FOO, works for me'

...or even just leave the comment.

> >  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.

 So subscribe your work machine to just updates, and your test machine
to updates-testing ... what is the problem here?

> > 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...).

 Sure, it's one of the many things on the TODO list to fix ... and with
yum-debug-dump / yum shell / etc. there are a couple of ways of hacking
this kind of thing in.
 However if you were running updates-testing refreshes fairly often then
anything going into updates would be fine for you, by definition.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora