Fedora Release Engineering Meeting Recap - 2009-05-04

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 13:56 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:

> The freeze override process exists to add a filter between developer and
> repo to catch the obvious and to help maintainers think a moment about
> what they're doing and whether it's acceptable to do in a freeze period.

I think this works well. It forces one briefly explain the benefit, and
justify the risk, of the update. That alone makes it less likely you're
going to screw things up with a hugely risky, or low value, update.

I'd still like to make the process a little more visible, though. These
freeze break requests are fairly central to the development process in
the lead up to GA. It should be easier for folks to follow what's going
on than running a trac query.

> it would make a lot more sense if developers would treat updates to a
> release with the same care as they treat updates during a freeze period,
> but that's a fight for another day.

Agreed. It seems logical that post-GA updates would go through a similar
process.

It could be as simple as two new fields in bodhi - "Benefit to users"
and "Risk of regressions" - and the ability for folks to jump in and say
"wait, that doesn't make sense" before an update gets pushed.

Cheers,
Mark.