Important kernel update should not break stuff

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ian Malone" <ibmalone at gmail.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 7:27:03 PM
> Subject: Re: Important kernel update should not break stuff
> 
> 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.

If we means all people subscribed to fedora-devel I think everyone should run with updates-testing enabled. This definition of we is the people that make Fedora happen so we should always test our stuff - non-stop. Regular updates are for users. From my POV everyone sending messages to fedora-devel is supposed to run with updates-testing enabled. And excuses like "no time" and etc. doesn't make sense as this case is showing that one can not simply care about his packages only because there is always something else that your package collaborates with that needs testing too.

Alex

> 
> 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
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