Fedora 13 Release Candidate Phase

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 20:27:51 -0700, Jesse wrote:

> What is releng supposed to do here though?

It's a hard problem related to tools *and* people.

The longer it takes to push packages into a repo, the longer the window
that creates the race condition. It could be that the push has completed
98% of the stuff that needs to be done, and a tester would vote -1 late
because of a show-stopper bug in one package.

If aborting a push is too expensive, that's not an option to do it
frequently. Especially not if some of the packages to be pushed in the
same transaction are considered urgent.

On the other hand, it's better to delay updates than to publish bad
updates.

What you could do is to sort updates by priority and process them in
separate transactions. You could use tools that lock and depcheck the
package set that will be pushed in one transaction. Then you could
implement a "grace time" that would make it possible to abort a push
transaction _once_ based on late votes, withdraw packages, and restart a
final push that would not be aborted again (with releng team being free to
override the automation, of course). The maintainer could opt-in to
"negative vote will abort push to stable". Testers/voters may lose the
ability to veto a push to stable if they repeatedly use -1
inappropriately. How often a push will be aborted remains to be seen.
Packages that lead to aborting a push often could be sanctioned (e.g.
by increasing the time they must sit in updates-testing).

Bodhi would add a comment to an update ticket when beginning to push
a package, and it would lock the package so it cannot be edited. So far,
the maintainers cannot know whether a package is being pushed already.

> We can't be experts in every
> package.  How are we to know that the negative karma is really
> appropriately negative, or bad negative, or just misfiled or confused
> users?  That's what the maintainer is for.

Same applies to positive karma. Is the +1 the result of substantial
testing or just a +1 to get the new "adventurous" stuff, which makes
Fedora less boring?