On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 02:23 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Freeze break: file a ticket with rel-eng, in an interface not explicitly
designed for package updates (which makes it clear you're talking to actual
humans and requires you to actually explain what you want in some form of
sentence), justify the change, explain why it doesn't break anything, wait
for 2 rel-eng members to explicitly approve it, and expect to be questioned
if your justifications are insufficient.
Update: fill it in in Bodhi, no explanation required at all (people file
updates even with blank descriptions and get away with it!), wait for the
next push. Only occasionally you or mschwendt will ask what the point of
the update is, or somebody (often mschwendt) will point out some broken
dependencies, and even in those cases it often ends up getting pushed
anyway. If nobody notices, it gets pushed by default (quite the opposite as
for the freeze breaks).
And no, I don't think requiring the same amount of bureaucracy for updates
as for freeze breaks will scale. (Updates already take too long to go out,
and I also think the workload would be too high for rel-eng.) I do think
blank or uninformative (e.g. "new upstream release") descriptions ought to
be banned though. Most likely a common process with some sort of middle
ground is needed, though I'm not sure how exactly it should look.
You're right. The work flow is less than ideal, and I have plans to
make it better. The idea of using bodhi and updates-testing to propose
and stage freeze breaks is an interesting one, but would require a lot
of bodhi work. We may be in a place where we can do that now though.
I've also got in the works some code that would let you do "make
freeze-request" or something like that to echo "make update" in
functionality.
I also agree that our update system is just a little too free form.
It's fairly obvious that left to their own devices, many of our
developers won't do the right thing. Of course there are also many
developers who feel the use of bodhi at all is an affront to their
sensibilities.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating