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

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Tue Mar 2 10:15:55 UTC 2010


Peter Jones wrote:
> When you're at the circus watching the clown ride a bicycle across a
> high-wire, he's got a safety net. It's not because the circus thinks he's
> an incompetent high-wire cyclist - it's because people occasionally make
> mistakes, and the circus would rather have him around to do his act again
> when he falls.

Yet some people do fune-walking or even fune-cycling without a safety net, 
for various reasons (e.g. the place they're doing their exercises in is such 
that mounting a safety net would be highly impractical there) and are still 
alive. Your proposal is akin to passing a law which bans fune-walking 
without a safety net. It'd have made some world records impossible. But the 
analogy isn't that great anyway (e.g. because a regression doesn't kill 
anybody! And it's usually trivial to revert to the last working version).

> Fedora is no different; there are many very competent maintainers out
> there, and all of us will eventually make a mistake. These mistakes
> sometimes have repercussions that are fairly serious, and when they do,
> it's important that the safety net is already there.

The question is: Are those mistakes worse than the issues caused by NOT 
pushing updates directly to stable? For example, some regressions slip 
through testing (this will ALWAYS happen, testing is not and CANNOT be 
perfect), why should our users have to suffer through them for several days 
instead of getting them fixed in the next update push (i.e. as soon as 
possible)? So my answer is: no, banning direct stable pushes will not 
improve things: for any issue it will prevent, there will be several it will 
introduce!

        Kevin Kofler



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