important question about updates [was Re: Infrastructure status, 2008-08-19 UTC 0200]

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 02:07:45AM +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Please give the infrastructure team the time they need to do this
> demanding work. They have been doing a spectacular job and deserve the
> absolute highest credit.

Having been in some serious infrastructure-crunch situations myself, I can
definitely imagine.

> We know the community is awaiting more detail on the past week's
> activities and their causes.  We're preparing a timeline and details and
> will make them available in the near future.  We appreciate the
> community's patience, and will continue to post updates to the
> fedora-announce-list as soon as possible.

Paul, your original message contained an ominous warning that no one should
download or update any additional packages. This is an untenable situation
for anyone depending on Fedora. You haven't mentioned this at all in the
subsequent messages; does this still apply? 

Following the line of thought to its logical conclusion, is there a risk
that end-user systems are compromised in some way via previous updates? I
know you've got things to work out, but with the school year starting and
all, we need to know what level of recovery work of our own will be
required. I'm not looking forward to following the infrastructure's long
weekend with one of my own -- but if I'm going to have to, I'd really
appreciate knowing about it as soon as possible.

Thanks.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>