When will we stop shipping WLAN improvements ahead of upstream in released Fedora version?

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all

John (CCed), I really appreciate your work in the wireless area and 
would like to use the opportunity to say "thanks for all you work", as 
support for WLAN hardware in the Linux kernel improved a lot in the 
upstream kernel and Fedora thx to your (and other linux wireless 
developers) work over the last two years.


But we now for at least the second time in the past few weeks had/have
a more-than-minor wireless breakage in a Fedora kernel for a released 
distro (bug #453390 now; http://lwn.net/Articles/286558/ is discussing 
the one some weeks ago; I think there was one more breakage not that 
long ago, but I can't remember). I and many users (see for example 
#453390) got hit by those problems. That's why I was wondering: what are 
we at Fedora doing to prevent similar problems in the future?


Three things spring to my mind and I just propose then here for 
discussion; maybe something good comes out of it in the end:

- a karama of "+3" in bodhi seems not enough for a auto-move from 
testing to stable (or even worse: straight to stable if enough people 
tested the kernel and gave their +1 after the update got filed in bodhi 
but *before* it actually hit fedora-testing) if there are no other 
pressing issues (like security fixes). The kernel is a to complex beast; 
more then 3 people should be needed to give a +1. And a bit of time 
needs to pass to give enough people the opportunity to install, test and 
report problems with new kernels. For the latest kernel it seems to me 
that "to less time" really was the problem, otherwise the problem from 
#453390 would have been noticed earlier

- should we separate security updates and other kernel fixes in a better 
  way to make sure those "other fixes" get proper testing before they 
get send out to the users?

- John, having all those pending and not-yet-upstream-merged 
improvements for wireless hardware in the Fedora kernel was something 
good in the past when WLAN support in the kernel was quite 
bad/incomplete. But the main and most important bits for proper wireless 
hardware support seem to be in the upstream kernel now; sure, there will 
always be improvements in the queue, but that's the same in most other 
linux subsystems with drivers as well. So I'm wondering: isn't it time 
now to finally stop shipping all those wireless-next bits (currently 
quite some big patches; see:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thl thl    2484 14. Mär 17:06 
linux-2.6-ms-wireless-receiver.patch
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thl thl   39874  4. Jul 22:21 linux-2.6-wireless-fixups.patch
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thl thl 2656652  4. Jul 22:21 linux-2.6-wireless-pending.patch
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thl thl 4165718  4. Jul 22:21 linux-2.6-wireless.patch
) in released Fedora Version (e.g. 8 and 9 currently) when we start 
shipping 2.6.26?


Just my 2 cent.

Cu
knurd