Summary/Minutes for Wednesday's FESCo meeting (2012-12-05)

[Till Maas]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2012 at 12:10:36AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 20:11 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 03:20:14PM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > 
> > > * 960 - F18 schedule + the holidays  (notting, 18:50:29)
> > >   * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JaroslavReznik/FedupF18Final -
> > >     not updated yet  (jreznik, 18:58:15)
> > 
> > >   * AGREED: Do not block on fedup signature checking (not a regression)
> > >     (+:7, -:0, 0:0)  (notting, 19:08:47)
> > 
> > how is not providing a supported way to do secure upgrade of Fedora not
> > a regression? 
> 
> If you read the IRC logs and not just the summary, this was all laid out
> there. It is part of the background in the bug:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=877623#c13

There it is only mentioned, that there were possibilities to do insecure
updates. The big change is, that now only insecure updates are possible.

> > And what is even
> > worse, the whole problem of not verifying packages on upgrade or the
> > upgrade image itself is not even prominently communicated. There is
> > nothing in the release notes about this:
> > http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Sysadmin.html#idm32350976
> 
> It would have been premature to put it in the release notes before this
> decision was made, obviously. What would've been the point of writing it
> into the release notes if FESCo had said 'this has to be fixed before we
> release F18'?

Since the release notes for the Beta release point to the final release
notes (as of yesterday they did actually point to the release notes for
Fedora 13 in the wiki), it should be mentioned there already. It can
still be removed if it is to be fixed.

> You nominated the bug as requiring a release note on 29th November, then
> complained that it wasn't in the release notes on 7th December -
> basically you gave the docs team about a week of turnaround time, which
> isn't a heck of a lot with a release with as many changes as F18.

The whole update process and procedure using fedup is afaik not even
properly designed or communicated. If I remember correctly for a long
time only vague information about a new update tool to be written were
posted to the devel list. And even now it is totally unclear how it will
work. On the other hand the Beta should be used for upgrade testing.
Publishing it before it is ready and all information is available is the
problem. If more time is needed to properly document it, then the time
should be taken instead of releasing the Beta without proper
documentation.

Regards
Till