FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Tue Mar 2 10:15:55 UTC 2010
Peter Jones wrote:
> When you're at the circus watching the clown ride a bicycle across a
> high-wire, he's got a safety net. It's not because the circus thinks he's
> an incompetent high-wire cyclist - it's because people occasionally make
> mistakes, and the circus would rather have him around to do his act again
> when he falls.
Yet some people do fune-walking or even fune-cycling without a safety net,
for various reasons (e.g. the place they're doing their exercises in is such
that mounting a safety net would be highly impractical there) and are still
alive. Your proposal is akin to passing a law which bans fune-walking
without a safety net. It'd have made some world records impossible. But the
analogy isn't that great anyway (e.g. because a regression doesn't kill
anybody! And it's usually trivial to revert to the last working version).
> Fedora is no different; there are many very competent maintainers out
> there, and all of us will eventually make a mistake. These mistakes
> sometimes have repercussions that are fairly serious, and when they do,
> it's important that the safety net is already there.
The question is: Are those mistakes worse than the issues caused by NOT
pushing updates directly to stable? For example, some regressions slip
through testing (this will ALWAYS happen, testing is not and CANNOT be
perfect), why should our users have to suffer through them for several days
instead of getting them fixed in the next update push (i.e. as soon as
possible)? So my answer is: no, banning direct stable pushes will not
improve things: for any issue it will prevent, there will be several it will
introduce!
Kevin Kofler
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