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

[Kevin Kofler]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> * Many (most) packages get pushed without testing. I consider people who
> believe package to see tested in "testing", to be in error.
> To me, "testing" isn't much more but a delay queue.

Good point.

> * Some maintainers ignore feedback on "packages in testing".

Indeed, and the proposed policy would do absolutely nothing to stop that!

> * Some packages will never be "100% stable" (e.g. the kernel, gcc, kde).

Right, and especially for those, being able to rush out a regression fix 
without delays is important!

> * The bugs with the highest visibilty are packages adding broken package
> dependencies. The fact these make it into the repos is a defect of
> Fedora's infrastructure.

In fact the fact they happen at all is often due to infrastructure/procedure 
issues, e.g. buildroot overrides are a mess. (Rel-eng now recommends using 
special build tags for the big updates, we'll see whether that'll help for 
KDE or just cause more chaos.)

But yes, the lack of automatic depchecking is also a big source of trouble.

> * Banning direct pushes does not prevent Fedora from being hit by bad SW.

+1

> I think this FESCO is heading the wrong way.
> 
> The real problem is not "broken updates", the problem is "badly
> maintained packages",  "careless maintainers", "overzealous developerss"
> and defects of Fedora's infrastructure.

Indeed. This is a social problem (and yes, the lack of automated QA is also 
an issue, but people are the main factor), it needs a social solution, not a 
technobureaucratic one!

> Particularly delicate are cases when "upstream" and "maintainer" are
> identical.

Well, I'm not sure this is a big factor in this particular case. The 
conflict of interest is more apparent in other situations, e.g. good luck 
getting a broken upstream default fixed if upstream is also the Fedora 
packager. (See e.g. spatial Nautilus, for which it took years for the 
maintainer to realize it sucks, it's now finally getting disabled by default 
in F13 according to the GNOME 2.30 feature page.)

        Kevin Kofler