Hello,
I've been watching the discussion in the bodhi thread. As a long time fedora /
redhat system user (since 0.5.1). Recently I've been getting myself involved in the
community, packaging and what not. I have watched the discussions related to testing for
the last few releases. I administer a number of Fedora systems, and I have a few friends
that have since started using linux as their main OS. I would *love* to help more by
providing feedback on updates-testing releases, I also know that my less experienced
friends are would be willing to participate with a few issues resolved to help them out.
Here are the deficiencies as I see them (which honestly could be a matter of not
knowing).
#1) Easy way to know where a package came from.
For example, as far as I am aware, I cannot query anything that tells me X packages are
from Y repo. If I were to become a 100% always enabled updates-testing, most of my
packages would be from that repo, however if I only do it occasionally I'd just have
to remember
#2 ) Easy way to downgrade if I were to run into problems
I understand that this isn't foolproof, and that for some issues (some huge glibc
error) my system could conceivably require advanced knowledge to boot into a rescue mode,
download packages and force the downgrade. However some way to view the updates-testing
packages I have installed, and downgrade to the 'released' version would be
awesome.
#3) Reminders
Knowing which packages I have installed that I have yet to provide karma for. Nothing too
insane as I know that if updates-testing was installed and I always installed everything
from it, there are lots of packages I couldn't really know if they worked or had
regressions. So alongside this feature would be a way to have a whitelist or blacklist of
packages I want to test or ignore.
#4) Easy way to update the karma on packages I've installed
I've heard of fedora-easy-karma, and it likely does what I want, but I think it needs
to be integrated into a complete tool that includes # 1 & 2.
#5) Easy way to turn on/off my willingness to use updates-testing.
Sometimes I could be busy and only want tested updates, it would be nice if this
imaginary tool I'm describing allowed me to say I'm done testing for now, and it
deals with disabling the repo and any reminders. If there was some nice tool to deal with
updates-testing enabling and the inclusion/exclusion of packages I wanted to test and all
that I laid out I would be on it in a second, and I'm guessing you'd have even
more testers.
One more clarifying point. I am *not* complaining about the current situation, I know
there are limited resources. I agree with the critpath updates policy for the most part. I
agree the quality of the packages needs to remain high and that part of that is autoqa,
testers and maintainers doing their jobs. I also realize that if I had the skills and time
I could write this tool. This is not a demand or complaint. I just wanted to illustrate
from my point of view what would make using updates-testing a *lot* easier for me. It is
quite possible everything I've outlined is already doable, if so then the last thing
is I guess an easy way for people like me to know about it so we can use it.
Just my thoughts,
--
Nathanael d. Noblet