What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Tom Lane]

"Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com> writes:
> You are trying to rely on other people's experiences with updates to
> justify whether you should be installing the update on your systems.
> You haven't described how you would expect to capture that distributed
> information from other people in such a way that you can make use of
> it before you need to make the decision as to whether or not to
> install that update on your very very precious machines.

It's worse than that.  Presumably, nobody is shipping deliberately-broken
packages, and so if there is a regression that is going to bite you then
it is contingent on factors not known to the package maintainer.  This
means that in reality, you won't even know what questions to ask ---
what combination of hardware, other software, and usage pattern is
really critical?  There is no way to know in advance.  And by the time
that a bug is well enough characterized that you could use such a
database to decide if it might bite you, the package is probably either
fixed or withdrawn.

There's certainly value in a karma-style scoring mechanism to help
identify badly broken releases, but I think it's a pipe dream to imagine
that that can be refined into any sort of reliable predictor of
individual results.

			regards, tom lane