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

[Thomas Janssen]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 04:34:13PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>
>> You make it look as if I was out to break people's systems
>
> Actually, I didn't intend to say anything about you. My point was that
> any increased bureaucracy has not been generated with the intention to
> reduce the amount of fun that developers have. If developers /do/ feel
> that their ability to have fun in Fedora has been reduced, I hope that
> in the long run that that gets more than compensated for by more
> positive feedback from our users and fewer angry complaints when
> people's systems break.
>
>> * 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,
>
> If updates cause regressions in functionality then that indicates that
> our update testing process failed. The answer to that is to fix the
> update testing process, not bypass it.
>
>> * 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,
>
> There is no change too trivial to not require testing. The software
> industry is full of examples of obviously correct fixes causing hideous
> breakage. Most developers get to learn that the hard way at some point,
> but it's still preferable to put processes in place to protect users
> from accidents.
>
>> * 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.
>
> Regardless of your definition, there were several users who felt that
> the KDE 4.4 update broke things. That's a problem. It makes us look bad.
> We'd like to avoid those users being unhappy.

Agreed on your points made above. The process for testing updates will
most likely never be perfect, but i have a good feeling we will get a
good system. Otherwise we (fedora community) have a good and loud mob
;p

-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium