182 pending F11 stable updates. WTF?

[Jesse Keating]

On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 02:23 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 
> Freeze break: file a ticket with rel-eng, in an interface not explicitly
> designed for package updates (which makes it clear you're talking to actual
> humans and requires you to actually explain what you want in some form of
> sentence), justify the change, explain why it doesn't break anything, wait
> for 2 rel-eng members to explicitly approve it, and expect to be questioned
> if your justifications are insufficient.
> 
> Update: fill it in in Bodhi, no explanation required at all (people file
> updates even with blank descriptions and get away with it!), wait for the
> next push. Only occasionally you or mschwendt will ask what the point of
> the update is, or somebody (often mschwendt) will point out some broken
> dependencies, and even in those cases it often ends up getting pushed
> anyway. If nobody notices, it gets pushed by default (quite the opposite as
> for the freeze breaks).
> 
> And no, I don't think requiring the same amount of bureaucracy for updates
> as for freeze breaks will scale. (Updates already take too long to go out,
> and I also think the workload would be too high for rel-eng.) I do think
> blank or uninformative (e.g. "new upstream release") descriptions ought to
> be banned though. Most likely a common process with some sort of middle
> ground is needed, though I'm not sure how exactly it should look.

You're right.  The work flow is less than ideal, and I have plans to
make it better.  The idea of using bodhi and updates-testing to propose
and stage freeze breaks is an interesting one, but would require a lot
of bodhi work.  We may be in a place where we can do that now though.
I've also got in the works some code that would let you do "make
freeze-request" or something like that to echo "make update" in
functionality.

I also agree that our update system is just a little too free form.
It's fairly obvious that left to their own devices, many of our
developers won't do the right thing.  Of course there are also many
developers who feel the use of bodhi at all is an affront to their
sensibilities.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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