thunderbird upgrade - wtf?

Mike Cloaked mike.cloaked at gmail.com
Wed Oct 14 17:08:28 UTC 2009


Mike McGrath <mmcgrath <at> redhat.com> writes:

> > And that's a people problem more than a process problem.  If nobody
> > tests it in updates-testing, then how is the maintainer to know that it
> > is problematic?  Certainly not solvable with even more repos for testing
> > content...
> >
> 
> You let me know how three people in Fedora can miss a very subtle Firefox
> memory leak.  How many people would need to use updates testing before the
> thunderbird indexing problem is caught?  How long would it need to stay
> there?  In this case updates-testing theory just does not match reality.
> 
> The status quo is broken, doing nothing will keep it that way.
> 
> 	-Mike
> 

Actually I don't think the blame is directly layable at the feet of either the
Fedora maintainer (who pushed an update with reasonable reports in bodhi
according to normal practice), nor the Fedora process which should have worked
if no poor upstream changes were made - but in fact this shows up the
vulnerability of Fedora to packages which have bad decisions made upstream.

In this case the upstream developers made a really bad decision to foist the
GLODA change and the smart folder change on users who installed this beta,
instead of taking the safer, and in my view better, decision to bring in these
new features, but to leave them switched off by default, but to advertise the
availability of these new features big time, and then let this simmer for a
while and wait for any bad user feedback.  Only if the new features were then
shown to be acceptable should they be enabled in a future update by default. In
this case, going that route would have shown that the new features were
certainly not acceptable to all users, and in particular users with large
amounts of stored mail with multiple accounts.






More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list