Update/install experience

[Will Woods]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 11:50 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:16:00 -0500
> "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > At FUDCon, Christopher Aillon and Jon McCann gave an interesting talk
> > on the Fedora software update/installation experience.  Bill
> > Nottingham and I were present, but given that other Board members have
> > had questions about this talk, I wanted to bubble this topic up for
> > some more attention.  I'm not sure how many other Board or FESCo
> > members were in attendance; there were many compelling talks at FUDCon
> > from which attendees had to choose.
> > 
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience
> 
> I'm still not sure this improves anything, at least from reading the
> page above (I wasn't able to be at fudcon). 
> 
> So, say we have 30updates/day currently. 

The average starts at around 25-30/day for the first 4 months and then
declines to 20 or less over the life of the release. Check the Bodhi
"Metrics" pages for some data.

> With this model they would pile up and then be tested in a unit?
> Then once a week all 210 of them would be pushed out?
> (The once a day blorp becomes a larger once a week blorp). 

Me, I'd prefer a once-a-month drop of changes, but yes. Same amount of
changes, just batched into larger, periodic system updates.

> Who is testing them "as a single unit" ?

Anyone who's interested in testing updates or getting early access to
new fixes and features. Collectively referred to as "QA". I'm sure
you've heard of us?

> How much time for testing would there be? If another update shows up
> the day before the weekly push, it would be deferred to the next one? 
> How about 2 days? 3?  

Policy remains to be set here. I'd personally advocate monthly update
pushes with a freeze at least one week before the release. Stuff that
comes in after the freeze goes into the next push.

> Would security updates hold for the next weekly push? 

Absolutely not; security updates will always go out as soon as they're
ready. Note that this would mean that we have *much* more available
manpower to test the security updates.

> Or push out as they are done? If so, wouldn't that mess up in progress
> testing? 

Not really. Security updates are usually small, targeted changes, and
they're pretty uncommon - I don't have exact numbers but I'd estimate
something like 10/month across the entire distribution; the number of
security updates for a typical install will be a subset of that. 

The destabilizing effect is much, much less than (e.g.) the daily
changes we get during the freezes for Alpha/Beta. It's a manageable
amount.

-w