Fedora 13 Release Candidate Phase

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:23:10PM +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
>On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 15:53 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>
>> If we combine that with requiring valid bug numbers before negative karma can
>> be applied, then I'd be ok with that.  Until we require that, there are way to
>> many corner cases where something like that isn't going to work well.
>
>Really? I don't think there's *that* many cases where a negative piece
>of karma is filed between the submission and the push which you'd want
>to ignore. And even in the rare cases when that happens, if we warn or
>even unsubmit the update, it's not like you can't do anything about it.
>If we make it a warning...ignore the warning. If we make it withdraw the
>update...just submit it again. I'm having a hard time seeing that fall
>apart.

The three biggest areas where I see auto-unsubmit being problematic are:

1) Negative karma for problems we can't fix.  E.g. "OMG MY DISPLAY GOES BLANK
WHEN I USE THE BINARY NVIDIA MODULE WITH THIS KERNEL/XORG/FORTUNE!"  We don't
care, we can't fix it, and it's just a hassle to make the maintainer resubmit
for crap like that.  The same is true for odd conglomerations of releases,
custom packages, and third party repos.

2) Packages like the kernel, where it works fine on 300 machines but somebody
has a crappy ass old Pentium 4 with the original BIOS and RDRAM and it causes
some weird oops.  In a perfect world, we'd hold up the kernel update and get
that fixed.  I'd also be able to crap gold bricks and pay my mortgage in smiles.
We aren't in a perfect world, and the greater good of fixing a larger number of
machines seems to warrant pushing that update out.  Again, more maintainer
hassle.

3) People just being jerks.  This is the rarest worry, but it would be rather
easy to intentionally cause another maintainer problems and never let them get
their updates out if we auto-unsubmitted on negative karma.

Now, if we make the auto-unsubmit value tunable per update, or a warning as you
also suggested, that might be more doable.  In the meantime, I can still work
on getting the client side push stuff to allow rel-eng to filter on karma
level.  It's probably pretty trivial to do that.

josh