Stephen Smoogen wrote:
Pretty much every one of those bodhi requirements is because either
* a developer did not use that wonderful organ for some reason, and people
said 'that should never happen again.'
* what the developer decided was not liked by other developers enough that
it was decided 'that should never happen again.'
Look back on the 15-20 years of fedora devel emails and see how many times
someone has said that something should never happen. Guess what? Enough
other developers agreed at times, and decided it needed to be automated
because the other big old complaint was about how long it took for people
to review things and how prone to failure was also true.
Whenever something "bad" happens, people are always quick to jump to the
conclusion that we need a law or rule banning the "bad" thing, no matter
whether a rule is actually a workable way to prevent it. So we end up with
overreaching laws banning even common activities, or with law texts so
complex that everyone agrees they need to be simplified.
In Fedora, we have had a handful bad updates making it to stable due to
questionable decisions by some maintainers, and instead of simply telling
those people to be more careful, we instead turned pushing Fedora updates
into a bureaucracy that just keeps getting worse and worse when invariably
bad updates keep slipping through because the complexity actually
discourages good practice instead of encouraging it. (E.g., many maintainers
enable automatic pushes because they need to wait so long to be allowed to
push an update to stable that they would forget to push it manually. But
automatic pushes are the most common source of bad updates making it
through, and also for issues such as broken upgrade paths between releases
(because one release happened to get karma sooner than the other).) So of
course the answer is that we need even stricter rules, because the
alternative would mean to admit a mistake and step back, which nobody seems
to be willing to do.
The original trigger for the update policy enforcement was actually an
update that broke the bind DNS server, a package that ~99% of Fedora users
do not even have installed. The response has always been a complete
overreaction.
Kevin Kofler