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

[Bill Nottingham]

Patrice Dumas (pertusus at free.fr) said: 
> I may be remebering wrong, but an argument for bodhi against those who
> wanted a simpler push mechanism (like wwhat was in the fedora extra days)
> and argued that bodhi will add more unecessary delays was that there 
> always was the possibility to push to stable for packagers.
> 
> Bringinig down productivity of good packagers for a few bad ones, is,
> in my opinion, not a good move. 

Fedora doesn't exist for the productivity of packagers. It exists for
the productivity of our users. 

To put it a different way, a large regression for our users far outweighs
tha cost of any number (heck, even hundreds) of bugfixes having to wait
a day, or two, or even a week.

For most bugfixes, the user doesn't notice at all. When a user gets a bugfix
on something they've hit, they think "oh, that's nice, Fedora fixed it", but
they don't really care whether it cam Monday or Friday. For every regression
they hit, they think "ARRGH, this Fedora crap. All I did is update and
now it's broken and I can't do what I want!" The impact on the user's
productivity and attitude isn't the same, and they can't be treated the
same.

Frankly I find some of these arguments bizarre. It essentially seems to
boil down to "our current testing doesn't work optimally, so we shouln't
bother". That's ridiculous. Everything we give to our users should be
tested. Every fix carries a risk of regression.

To phrase a strawman differently:

"No update is pushed to users without verification and testing from entities
other than the packager."

Consider it a second eye. Consider it a form of code review. These are all
*good* things, and we can work on defining in the policy what sort of
verification that is, how much is needed, etc., and then adjusting our
tools to cope with this, help get the feedback and verification we need,
and provide the best OS we can.

Or, we can scream at the concept of any change and post 20+ messages
in 5 hours to the list. Everyone has that choice.

Bill