On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:00:40 +0100
Matthew Garrett <mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
979205 got filed yesterday, which makes it incredibly difficult to
install F19 on Macs while keeping OS X. This is rather frustrating,
since Fedora's the only distribution with any significant support for
running on Apple hardware. There's two problems here:
1) QA apparently don't have any Macs, so it's difficult to test this
case
2) Policy says that once the go decision has been made, there's no
way to revoke it
(1) is something that we really need to solve, because it's clearly
unreasonable to expect community members to have a test Mac to
install every RC.
(2) is stranger. Obviously once an image is released, we're not going
to be able to recall it, and we have no history of producing updated
install images. But right now we're in a window where we haven't
officially shipped anything and are saying we can't fix this issue
purely because we've written a policy that says we can't.
It's not strange to me. Once "go" happens there's a lot of wheels that
start in motion:
- Press/announcements/scheduling. Things like release day parties,
ordering media to give out at events, reviewers in press, etc.
- Branched nightly compose is disabled, 0 day updates populated. If we
needed to pick things out of updates to re-add to the base repo we
would have to reverse this, which is of course possible, but a
gigantic hassle, something we have never done before so likely error
prone, etc.
- Content is staging to mirrors. We could of course tweak this content,
but mirrors are expecting it now and may not like having to re-sync
large content like isos. Note that a fedora release is not "an
image". It's a pretty staggering amount of content. ;)
and finally the big one:
- Say we ground all the wheels to a halt and slipped for this bug.
Where to do we draw the line? If someone comes up with a bug at
9:50am on release morning, do we cancel everything? There has to be a
point where we say "sorry, it's too late" and this has been it since
it makes sense from a logistic standpoint.
Hopefully this makes sense.
kevin