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

[Kevin Kofler]

Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> Another annoying issue is updates with no explanations. There is a
> "Notes" field in bodhi that many people just ignore for an unknown
> reason. Any update with less than a specified number of characters
> (~40) in the Notes should also be banned.

That's a completely unrelated issue!

I actually sorta agree with you on this point (though enforcing 40 chars 
minimum is unlikely to help, it'll just lead to folks filling in crap like 
"update foo to the latest upstream version", we're already seeing useless 
"information" like that), but this has absolutely nothing to do with direct 
stable pushes.

> I can't see a reason to make exceptions.

What about the many valid reasons that have been brought up? E.g. if a 
package is destroying people's hardware, wouldn't you want the fix to go out 
BEFORE your hardware is dead?

> If people used the testing repo appropriately, things would actually get
> tested.

I don't think it's the maintainers' fault that testing is insufficient, but 
rather that there are just not enough testers.

> I wish there was a solution without some sort of banning, but apparently,
> there is not.

Policies? Banning only those folks who don't follow policies from direct 
stable pushes (or even from Bodhi entirely, or even all of Fedora)? Why 
punish those who work really hard to make things work for everyone and who 
will now have their perfectly fine and safe fixes delayed for purely 
bureaucratic reasons?

> Any change needs testing. Even one liners.

I'm not convinced. Some changes are really trivial.

And direct stable pushes are usually tested by at least one person before 
they're queued directly to stable anyway. For a one-line fix, that's usually 
more than enough (and when it's not, the maintainer knows why, e.g. if that 
one line enabled a 10000-line feature).

        Kevin Kofler