Blocking on user switching: redux
Hi folks!
So, during Fedora 32 Final blocker review, a bug relating to "user
switching" came up for review:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1817708
I dug into the question of whether we have tended to consider the "log
in / log out / shut down / reboot" criterion as covering user
switching, and found that this issue is actually kinda outstanding and
unresolved for a long time.
Back in January 2015, we kinda provisionally decided that we *did* want
to block on user switching bugs, by accepting this one as a blocker
during a review meeting:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1184933
kparal was detailed to propose clearly adding it to the criteria, and
he duly drafted up a change and mailed it to the relevant lists -
test@, kde@ and desktop@:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2015-January/124811.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/kde/2015-January/014175.html
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-January/011558.html
However, here things foundered a bit because there was some opposition
to the idea. The discussion is spread across the three lists, but my
reading is broadly that there were distinct camps in favour of and
against blocking on user switching bugs. Prominent "pro-blocking" folks
were Michael Catanzaro and Kevin Kofler. Prominent "anti-blocking"
folks were Matthias Clasen, Rex Dieter and Josh Boyer. Obviously that's
a particularly awkward split because we have pro- and anti- folks on
both the desktop and KDE teams.
The discussion was pretty active, but in the end it sort of petered out
without any definite conclusion being reached. The draft changes Kamil
proposed were never made, and the criterion remained as it was before.
For the purposes of our specific F32 blocker proposal we decided to
adopt the principle that, since there was a discussion that clearly did
not reach a consensus that user switching *should* be release-blocking,
we could not really treat it as such, and thus we rejected the bug as a
blocker. But I figured it would probably be a good idea to bring the
topic up again and try to come to a definite conclusion this time.
So, once again: do we think it makes sense to consider desktop user
switching - that is, switching between multiple active desktop sessions
for different users, without logging out and in - as release-blocking?
Has anyone who was active in the previous discussion changed their mind
on this?
I suppose one question that could potentially arise is whether we could
treat it as release-blocking for GNOME but not for KDE, or vice versa.
In general I think it's a good goal to try and keep our standards
similar across our release-blocking desktops, but I do think we could
at least consider that, if the discussion seemed to be going in that
direction.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net