Res: Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> The stable packages work is an extension of this. Even if we, as
> maintainers, have plenty of fun, that's pretty easily wiped out if even
> a small proportion of our users have to spend time fixing a system that
> a stable update has broken. And without users who enjoy using and
> talking about Fedora, the entire exercise is pointless. Fesco isn't
> introducing rules because it wants our developers to become rule-bound
> drones, but because it wants our developers to actually be able to see
> people using what those developers produce and interact with a community
> of people who *use* Fedora, not just people who develop it. Personally,
> I think it's reasonable to ask developers to do slightly more work if it
> means our users have to do significantly less.

You make it look as if I was out to break people's systems, when actually 
what I'm arguing for is:
* allowing important bugfixes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they 
aren't too risky/non-trivial), in order to get very needed bugfixes (e.g. 
regression fixes) out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS,
* allowing trivial changes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they are 
important/useful enough) because there's hardly any way they can break 
anything, in order to get ultra-low-risk improvements out to our users 
faster and make them suffer LESS,
* allowing new upstream releases as updates IF AND ONLY IF THEY DON'T BREAK 
THINGS (with a very precise definition of "break things" I don't want to 
repeat again) and after sufficient regression testing and fixing, bringing 
both new features and bugfixes to our users without the breakage of an 
unstable distribution such as Rawhide and thus making them suffer LESS.

Please stop attacking a strawman!

        Kevin Kofler