Proposed udpates policy change

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 08.03.10 21:59, Matthew Garrett (mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org) wrote:

> The ability for maintainers to flag an update directly into the updates 
> repository will be disabled. Before being added to updates, the package 
> must receive a net karma of +3 in Bodhi.

Two questions:

How do you plan to convince people to actually test packages? My
understanding right now is that folks who end up testing packages do so
exclusively because they themselves ran into the bug that is being
fixed. And as soon as that itch they are scratching is fixed, they
seldomly report back about this. (At least that is what I am
experiencing. In quite a few cases I know that people happily took
packages from bodhi but never reported back)

Making the user Karma logic the *only* path into the stable distribution
hence makes the distro depend on feedback by our users. And I 
wonder if we really want to depend on that. 

And secondly: trhere are many bugs that are only triggered in very
particular use cases or on very particular hardware. Nonetheless they
are bugs that are worth to be fixed. For those it is going to be hard to
get updates accepted simply because the number of people who could and
want to test this is minimal. (And I know what I am talking of, having
to deal with PA compatibility with a vast number of different audio
hardware and drivers).

All in all, I think the Karma logic is a good tool to speed up things,
it is not useful as the *only* path into the stable distribution. 

Unless of course we create some kind of body whose sole job is to test
and provide karma to updates that are not otherwise tested by the
users. And which hence can be blamed if packages stay stuck in bodhi.

Because right now there is a substantial number of updates I push that
stay stuck in bodhi for really long times because not enough people
bother... And if in the future those packages will stay there forever
because I cannot push them myself than I'd be royally annoyed.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4