Broken upgrade paths in F7

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 23:51 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 23:25 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Josh Boyer wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 23:12 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >>>> As such I think Rahul is shooting way over the top with
> >>>>> pulling them from the repo, as that creates even more trouble for users.
> >>>> Package is broken. Maintainer refuses to fix it. Others are not 
> >>>> interested. Pulling the packages is the right way to go since they are 
> >>>> implicitly orphaned packages. What alternative are you suggesting?
> >>> That's not quite true in this case.  The package isn't broken.  The tag
> >>> on which it sits is.  Just clarifying that.
> >> Purely from the end user perspective what difference does it make? I 
> > 
> > None.  But then again, neither does your suggestion of pulling the
> > packages out of the repo :).
> 
> It does make a pretty big difference in the overall quality of the 
> repository. I can solidly claim that every single package in the release 
> has a good update path. 

Having the ability to make that claim is ridiculous if you accomplish it
by yanking the damn packages out of the repository.  Especially when
it's over something as trivial as a tag.

YOU ARE NOT HELPING END USERS BY DOING THAT.  Look at the zope thread
from last week if you don't believe me.  And that is a case where the
package _is_ broken and it's not just a matter of a tag.

> Quality and robustness of the repository and 
> updates is one of the biggest problems we need to tackle. 

We are tackling it.

> I see people 
> suggesting that pulling off packages is over the top but I dont see 
> anyone suggesting any other alternative. 

I suggested we wait a couple days.  Ralf has not officially declared his
packages to be orphaned.  I'm hoping he'll be amenable to perhaps
another maintainer submitting the tag request since he's taking a break
from Fedora.

> Does anyone want to knowingly 
> put packages into the release with fundamental issues like this?

I don't think anyone likes to have broken upgrade paths, no.

> There is a usability issue in that packages being dropped are not 
> immediately visible to end users. There are other potential solutions or 
> that.  I have already suggested before to have a live upgrade 
> tool/Anaconda module which checks for packages that does not have a 
> proper update path (Packages that orphaned/pulled off the repository for 
> any other reasons such as licensing, improperly configured third party 
> repository packages ,custom packages etc) and list them with any 
> possible solutions.

Yeah a tool like that would be nice.  It is entirely too late for this
particular situation, but it would be nice indeed.

josh