FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:16:43 +0100, Kevin wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> at the FESCo meeting on Tuesday, everyone except me seemed to be set on 
> wanting to disable the possibility to queue updates directly to stable in 
> Bodhi. 

That would be a ridiculous decision. It would be much better to disable
that feature only for those update submitters who really have been
dilettantish enough to use it inappropriately more than once.

> Some situations where I and others have used direct stable pushes in the 
> past and where I think they're really warranted and should be used:
>
> * A new package which doesn't replace anything, and which I verified to work 
> fine for me. It's clearly not a completely broken package and there's no way 
> it can break anybody's existing setup as nobody has that package yet.

Unconvincing, though. History has shown that some packagers still managed
to push new packages that suffered from broken deps and failure to start
at run-time (and even misplaced files). Especially for _new_ packages,
dep-breakage would be avoidable by pushing them as test-updates as long as
there is not integrated depchecking yet.

> * A regression which causes big breakage at least for some people slipped 
> through testing for whatever reason. We urgently want the fix to get out 
> ASAP.
>
> * A regression slipped through testing for whatever reason and the patch is 
> trivial. We want the fix to get out ASAP, and the risk of breakage is very 
> low.

The possibility to publish hot-fixes is most important.

> * A trivial bugfix (like a one-line diff), tested and confirmed to fix the 
> bug by at least one person. The risk of breakage is extremely low.

For some bugs and some bug-fixes [and some packages], waiting for testers
is just a waste of time.