systemd and changes

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Matthew Miller (mattdm at mattdm.org) said:
> > So, I'm honestly asking: what are the odds that these few things are the
> > only improvements that cause a disruptive change to user interaction? I
> > don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if there are other changes which fit
> > this category.
>
> My concern with this line of thinking is that you're asking us to quantify
> the unknown unknown, and define a time period of testing which is
> 'long enough' for us to catch all the unknown unknowns. This seems
> impractical, in as much as it doesn't give us any clear criteria to define
> success with.
>

It's just risk management.  I think we'd be better off acknowledging there
are unknown unknowns and try to mitigate them.  One way we could have done
that this time around was making it an optional feature (as Matt was
mentioning in a previous email) for F14 and then decide in F15 if it was
ready.  Unfortunately that's not the path we seem to be on.  We unwisely
seemed to declare it ready before anyone even saw it then we ignored what
we didn't know as if we knew there were going to be no problems.  The sad
thing is that's such an easy fix by making brand new features for core
components like this opt in, even if it's just for a single release.

	-Mike