The new Update Acceptance Criteria are broken (was: Re: Heads Up - New Firefox update)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-11-01 at 18:51 +0100, Miloslav Trmač wrote:

> > Sorry, but characterizing it as a 'known problem' is misleading. It's
> > easy to forecast failure, and you'll likely always be correct in *some*
> > cases if you forecast enough failures. Only if you precisely forecast
> > only the failures that actually happen, and do not forecast any failures
> > that don't happen, can your forecast be considered truly reliable.

> The accuracy of prediction, and especially accuracy of the timing, is
> not at all relevant.  In fact, it is _preciselly_ the unknown nature of
> risks that requires thinking about them in advance.

Which rather contradicts your description of it as a 'known problem',
yes?

> People don't wear helmets because they know when something will hit
> their head, but because they don't know when, or even if, it will.
> Mirek

That's not really a relevant analogy. You can't 'wear a helmet' in this
case. There's no way we could have implemented the policy and 'worn a
helmet' by allowing updates to happen without the conditions of the
policy being fulfilled; that would effectively negate the policy. 

If you want to continue with the analogy, what you seem to be saying is
that we should never have implemented the policy in the first place,
which is not analogous to wearing a helmet; it's analogous to never
leaving the house just in case something hits you on the head.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net