Proposed udpates policy change

[Michal Schmidt]

On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:41:44 -0500 Jon Masters wrote:
> I also suggest /considering/ implementing rolling updates rather than
> pushing everything to stable. By rolling updates, in this case I mean
> implementing a technical means (and this is tricky with mirrors) by
> which not every user will receive the update at once.

Hi Jon,
please do not overload the term 'rolling updates'. That's just
confusing. Perhaps 'staggered' would convey your intended meaning
better.

But what do you mean to accomplish with it?
I guess when an update with an unforseen serious regression gets pushed
to updates you want to give us a chance to react before too many users
download it.

When the broken dbus update fiasco happened it was frustrating to know
that people in one time zone after another upgrade to the broken
build even though the regression was already known. The fixed build may
have been done quickly, but because of the long time it takes from
building a package to have it appear in updates on mirrors there was
not much Fedora could do to limit the damage.

If it is not possible to shorten the minimal from-Koji-to-mirrors delay
to something on the order of one hour (wouldn't that be awesome?), then
perhaps there should be a way to blacklist known brown-paper-bag
updates in the metalinks (which are not affected by the delay). I
believe this would be more useful than staggered updates.

Michal