FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Parag N(पराग़)]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> at the FESCo meeting on Tuesday, everyone except me seemed to be set on
> wanting to disable the possibility to queue updates directly to stable in
> Bodhi. The only reason this was not decided right there (with no outside
> feedback) is that Matthew Garrett (mjg59) wants to write down a precise
> policy (which may end up even more restrictive, like some arbitrary minimum
> time period of testing).
>
> He also noted that doing so "gives us an opportunity to discuss various
> consequences with affected teams". But sadly, the people driving this
> proposed change haven't used this opportunity to discuss this issue in a
> transparent way as I would have expected (and I've been waiting for almost 3
> days!), so I am doing it now. (We really need more transparency in decision
> making!)
>
> I would like to collect feedback on this issue. If you want to disable
> direct stable pushes, why? Could there be a less radical solution to that
> problem (e.g. a policy discouraging direct stable pushes for some specific
> types of changes rather than a blanket ban)? On the other hand, if (like me)
> you DON'T want that feature to go away, please provide valid use cases.
>
> Some situations where I and others have used direct stable pushes in the
> past and where I think they're really warranted and should be used:
> * A new package which doesn't replace anything, and which I verified to work
> fine for me. It's clearly not a completely broken package and there's no way
> it can break anybody's existing setup as nobody has that package yet.
> * A regression which causes big breakage at least for some people slipped
> through testing for whatever reason. We urgently want the fix to get out
> ASAP.
> * A regression slipped through testing for whatever reason and the patch is
> trivial. We want the fix to get out ASAP, and the risk of breakage is very
> low.
> * A trivial bugfix (like a one-line diff), tested and confirmed to fix the
> bug by at least one person. The risk of breakage is extremely low.
>
> If you can think of more, please post them! But even if you just agree with
> me, please reply so the other FESCo members don't think it's just me!
>

 Gr8, maintainers already got overhead by introducing branched F-13
and devel branches which made people to stop pushing updates to F-13
as we need to push them using bodhi and now bodhi also got
restrictions. I think people will stop contributing to Fedora now
after seeing so many policies and rules for maintaining packages for
Fedora releases.
  - Parag.