systemd and changes

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Mike McGrath (mmcgrath at redhat.com) said:
> > > 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.
>
> Sure, but when you say 'we should hold off X period of time' in order to
> mitigate unknown unknowns, how do you define 'X'? How do you know when it's
> ready? All I'm seeing are appeals to gut feelings. We can all say that 'more
> time == more testing', but how do you claim 'good enough'?
>

I'd say one release is good enough for Fedora.

> > 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.
>
> Having to support multiple boot paths for the system, making everyone
> who gets odd bugs filed against kernel, dracut, plymouth, etc. triage them
> isn't exactly an 'easy fix' - it *adds* complication to both paths.
>

I'd rather have multiple boot paths to choose from then only one boot path
that is 2 months old.  It should be added to the cost of the change.
(yet another thing we ignored in this process).  My experience has so far
been very bad with systemd so when Lennart proclaims that everything's
fine, I'm just filled with more worry.

I'm trying to figure out how to prevent this in the future so we stop
losing users.  (Yes, we really are at pre-FC6 numbers wrt user base which
means we have the fewest number of users since we started keeping track of
such things) and I think it's because of poorly planned "features" like
these.

	-Mike