Updates System

[Jesse Keating]

On Wednesday 16 May 2007 03:19:08 Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Update 40 packages at once and you'll probably notice why I consider
> this to be a crack ridden work-flow. 2 steps more per package and one
> form per package demonstrates the flaws of this workflow.

Given that the tool allows you to release multiple packages with the same 
announcement / reasons / bugs / etc it is quite easy to prepare a stack of 
packages for update, say a flaw in a library is discovered, you have to build 
a new version of library, and a bunch of downstream packages against said 
library, you can release the entire stack under a single web form, and now 
all your updates have context, and it can even autoupdate a bug once it is 
pushed to the world.


> 0) maintainer tests package's  functionality.
>
> > 1) Maintainer checks changes into CVS branch.
> > 2) Maintainer builds.
> > 3) Maintainer tests that build.
> > 4) Maintainer fills out the form with the N-V-R, optional security
> > (yes/no), optional Bug numbers fixed, and some fills in some details of
> > what the update is about, then chooses updates or updates-testing.
> > 5) Submit, where security and/or rel-eng team pushes it through.
>
> Now where in this scheme is Will Woods? I don't see him testing
> anything. All I see is more bureaucracy and more manual steps than
> before.

Perhaps this is where we're not communicating clearly enough.  Will isn't 
going to be doing (all) the testing himself.  However Will is going to be 
driving a QA team and anybody else who is interested to make use of the 
public updates-testing repo.  The testing will be the wider audience of those 
that use updates-testing and who may have configurations or situations beyond 
what you as the maintainer could test yourself before releasing the updates.  
It gives you a chance to land the update on more people's machines for wider 
testing before just lobbing it over the wall at our general user base.  And 
if the update isn't quite right, well it was in updates-testing so no harm, 
no foul.  If the update wasn't quite right and you pushed it into -final 
updates and everybody's machine now you've just given not only yourself a bad 
name as a maintainer, but you've given Fedora a bad name as a distro too. 
(yes yes, we all know you consider Fedora to be a horrible distro already, 
but many of us don't.)

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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