more updates discussion

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:38:38 +0100
François Cami <fdc-lists(a)fcami.net&gt; wrote:

>  On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Kevin Kofler
>  <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at&gt; wrote:
>  > Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  >> So, there are no folks in the KDE sig using F13 anymore?
>  >>
>  >> Perhaps call for testers in the users / kde lists?
>  >
>  > I think this issue goes far, far beyond just KDE. There are
>  > packages which have few users even for Fedora n, let alone n-1.
>
>  That may be pure speculation, but it seems that Fedora contributors
>  testing updates only use Fedora n because they tend to upgrade as soon
>  as the next release is available. We have a few choices, including:
>  * actively deciding that n-1 will receive less updates than n (good, I
>  think, because the worst kinks should be hammered out of a distro in 6
>  months anyway, so that leaves more or less security).
>  * pushing updates for n-1 no matter what testing they've had (bad).
>  Any other option I haven't thought of? 
Some more: 

* Try and increase number of people testing N-1/N-2 updates. 

a) Be more active about asking people to test new versions in support
channels (#fedora/users list/forums) and have an easy to understand
landing point for them on the wiki to find out more. 

b) Try and solicit testers in area specific channels (kde lists,
proftpd users, etc). "Anyone here using X on fedora? here's how you can
help us out: ..."

c) Provide better test cases to allow casual users to test the updates
in vm's or the like. 

* Stop shipping N-2 / N-1 sooner. If no one is using them, why ship
  them?

* focus on 'high/important' updates with what testing we have. Would
  need some way to note or mark them however. 

>  > Yet another example of the update processes delaying an update
> for
>  > ages is the recent libgsf update
>  > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/libgsf-1.14.18-1.fc13 ,
>  > which was stuck for a month until the maintainer sent a nagmail to
>  > this mailing list (a method to get provenpackager attention which
>  > doesn't really scale). (libgsf is critpath due to being a
>  > dependency of something critical, so it gets the extra-hardcore
>  > policy.)
>  
>  The bug was only opened more than four months after f13 was released.
>  My interpretation is that not many users were impacted, and therefore
>  living another month with it was acceptable. 
This update could have also used much better notes. 

"This update fixes a problem in zip output that could cause abiword and
gnumeric to make documents that cannot be read by programs not using
this same version of libgsf. Please test by: 
*saving a document in gnumeric or abiword in ODF format
*try opening the doc in another fedora version or other distro or in
openoffice and confirm the document is read correctly"

Given that I would have been happy to spend some time testing it. 
Given that the update had a bug titled: "Please update to at least
1.14.18" and there were no notes, I thought it was simply a request 
for a new minor version. 

kevin