Important kernel update should not break stuff

[Ian Malone]

On 13 June 2012 13:31, Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurtako at redhat.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Roman Kennke" <rkennke at redhat.com>
>> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 3:15:14 PM
>> Subject: Re: Important kernel update should not break stuff

>> >         - How can problems like the one I described above be
>> >         avoided?
>> >         Is there
>> >         anything I and others can help with?


>> Ok, fair enough. The question remains, how can we avoid such bad
>> things
>> to happen in the future? Should I regularily try out kernel builds on
>> their way to stable, and object to their stable-release when I find a
>> problem? And how would I do that? (I.e. how can I find out when a new
>> kernel is about to go to stable, and when to test it, etc) And what
>> about the other base components of the system? (Although, to be fair,
>> the kernel seems to be the most problematic one..)
>
> Try having updates-testing repo enabled test and provide karma via bodhi. +1 is as needed as -1 as without it we never know whether people simply installed and it worked so they stopped at that point. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bodhi for details. There is also fedora-easy-karma to ease mass reporting via bodhi.
> Note that this would not make it easier for you short term as you would spot the problems just a bit earlier. But if enough people do that problems might even be spotted before you update next time and the build untagged so you never see the broken build/update at all.
> This kind of workflow is effective only if we manage to gather critical mass.
>

I get the need for people to volunteer and test and that's fine. But
the thing I can't square here is why then we aren't all on
updates-testing all the time? The kernel is one of the few packages
you can guarantee everyone is using. We'd all like to know if an
upcoming kernel has problems that will affect us, but you can't know
that until you run it.

So the answer is to test it by being on updates-testing, but this
means you put yourself in the way of every possible kernel update and
open yourself to more potential problems. I don't have a solution for
that, but it's clearly something that needs some thought (as someone
who has quite a few times been stuck on old kernels and trying
updates-testing ones to see if they fix a newly introduced problem).

One question is why are regressions quite so common for some
components? iwlwifi for example seems to show up quite a bit.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk