acceptability of updates-testing breakage vs. rawhide breakage

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2014-01-11 at 00:49 +0900, Mamoru TASAKA wrote:
> Chuck Anderson wrote, at 01/10/2014 11:56 PM +9:00:
> > On Thu, Jan 09, 2014 at 10:42:33AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2014-01-09 at 10:13 -0500, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> >>> This appears to have also broken Fedora 19 updates-testing, which is
> >>> even less acceptable than breaking rawhide.
> >>
> >> Eh, I'd suggest not. updates-testing is actually explicitly meant as a
> >> place to catch this kind of problem, whereas we're trying to keep
> >> Rawhide rolling and especially try not to break nightly image
> >> generation. At least we can vote broken things in updates-testing down.
> >
> > Wow, really?  updates-testing is allowed to be more broken than
> > rawhide?  So why don't we just do all development in updates-testing,
> > and don't push these changes to rawhide until they pass the
> > updates-testing karma?
> >
> > This is not how I understand these things should work.  I think this
> > attitude will push even fewer people to run with updates-testing
> > enabled.
> >
> 
> Exactly.  Such possibly-breaking tests must be done on rawhide first,
> not after on testing on stable branch,
> and at least the package maintainer must get confident that enough tests are
> done on rawhide before pushing such packages into testing on stable branch.
> That testing on stable branch is more broken than rawhide is not Fedora users
> or developers expect.

Things don't really work out this neatly in practice. Most packages
diverge between rawhide and stable at some point. Especially a change
like the one under discussion doesn't necessarily work fine in one
branch just because it did in another.

I was just disagreeing with Chuck's belief that it's massively worse to
cause a relatively minor problem - it's not like this broke anyone's
system - in updates-testing than in Rawhide. I don't see a major
difference, really.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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