Proposed udpates policy change
Al Dunsmuir
al.dunsmuir at sympatico.ca
Tue Mar 9 20:48:57 UTC 2010
Hello Krzysztof,
Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 3:36:43 PM, you wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> writes:
>> 2) It is impossible to ensure that functionality will not be reduced
>> without sufficient testing.
> True.
The whole point of an update may be the deliberate removal of
features/functionality. This includes removal of elements whose
upstream is dead, removal of conflicts between packages, conversion of
static/copied libraries to the system provided library, removal of
features which are irretrievably broken, and those elements which do
not fit within Fedora's licence/mission (mp3 support, or patented
material).
>> 3) Sufficient testing of software inherently requires manual
>> intervention by more than one individual.
> Definitely. IOW, the testing is never sufficient.
Any nontrivial piece of software contains bugs until it reaches
end-of-life. This is a simple fact of life.
You can't test quality into a product like Fedora. You can only
attempt to assist developers in discovering issues that have escaped
their unit tests, so that through iterations of design/code/test the
package becomes stable and feature complete. It takes many iterations,
across many releases for some packages.
>> 1) Updates to stable that result in any reduction of functionality to
>> the user are unacceptable.
An absolute rule containing "any" ignores reality.
> That means any and all updates are unacceptable.
> --
> Krzysztof Halasa
The opposite of change is death. No updates as a hard and fast rule
would drive many users and packages away from Fedora.
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