Release criterion proposal: upgrade methods

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 18:15 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> Another way to put it...I'd say that interlinking the criteria and the
> installation guide, as you outline it above, has provided us with a
> *benefit*: we have identified an inconsistency between what the
> installation guide reckons is reliable and what QA and devel are making
> any kind of effort to ensure actually is reliable. If we just wrote the
> criteria in some kind of silo where we had our own definitions of
> everything, it wouldn't make that problem go away, would it? The
> installation guide would still be out there and would still be advising
> people to do something that maybe it shouldn't be advising people to do.
> Given that Fedora's a collaborative effort, I'd say we should be
> consciously trying to interlink between teams as much as possible as a
> way to ensure we're all on the same page, not silo'ing off our efforts
> from each other because we're scared of what we might find out from
> working together...

Not to hammer the point too much, but there's another reason, now I come
to think of it. It's _precisely_ the same reason we require packages to
use shared system libraries, not static linking.

Let's say instead of referring to the 'Upgrading' wiki page for the
definition of Fedora's 'officially recommended upgrade methods', we just
read it once and write whatever it says into the criteria pages instead.
What did we just do? We static linked the officially recommended upgrade
methods.

Now, if that's the way Fedora as a project is going to do things, we're
not going to be the only ones! The installation guide will likely do the
same. I'm sure releng has some document somewhere which refers to
upgrade methods; that one will static link them too. The forums will
probably do the same thing in a sticky thread somewhere.

Now imagine we as a project decide to change our officially recommended
installation method - as, indeed, it appears we are currently doing.
What has to happen? Same exact problem you have when there's a
vulnerability in a statically linked library: we have to go around and
change every damn instance. We have to change the Upgrading page's text,
the criteria page's text, the releng page's text, the installation
guide, the forum sticky thread...

It's a different area but the same exact problem. As a general
principle, we should have *one* canonical reference point for things
like this, which everything else should refer to. Then when it changes,
you only have to update the canonical definition.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net