On 03/02/2010 05:15 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Peter Jones wrote:
>> When you're at the circus watching the clown ride a bicycle across a
>> high-wire, he's got a safety net. It's not because the circus thinks he's
>> an incompetent high-wire cyclist - it's because people occasionally make
>> mistakes, and the circus would rather have him around to do his act again
>> when he falls.
>
> Yet some people do fune-walking or even fune-cycling without a safety net,
> for various reasons (e.g. the place they're doing their exercises in is such
> that mounting a safety net would be highly impractical there) and are still
> alive. Your proposal is akin to passing a law which bans fune-walking
> without a safety net. It'd have made some world records impossible. But the
> analogy isn't that great anyway (e.g. because a regression doesn't kill
> anybody! And it's usually trivial to revert to the last working version).
You're right about my analogy not being perfect, but it doesn't really need to
be. You seem to be trying to miss the point here. The analogy was not to
"people doing crazy things", it was to people doing seemingly crazy things in
a circus act. Let me be a bit more explicit. The difference between our
analogies is that in the former (your fune-cycling example), the people doing
the crazy thing face all of the consequences. In the latter (my original circus
analogy), the circus is also hurt when a performer goes splat in front of the
audience. In the circus analogy, the ringmaster wants the net there - because he
needs his good (but mortal) performers to survive to do the act again, or else
eventually there won't be any circus.
To categorize our analogies, mine is an analogy for Fedora, yours is an analogy
for your desktop machine. If you feel like running new untested packages on
your desktop machine, that's fine, we've got rawhide (and updates-testing) for
that. You can also feel free to participate in life-threatening activities that
you find challenging and beneficial to your own well being and try to establish
records for not dying on the highest high-wire or whatnot. Running untested
packages may toast your desktop machine, but doing so also has inherent benefit
to the greater group. But putting those packages in Fedora without going
through updates-testing or rawhide first is effectively doing the high-wire
without a net /in the circus/, not in your back yard or the alps or wherever on
your own.
>> Fedora is no different; there are many very competent maintainers out
>> there, and all of us will eventually make a mistake. These mistakes
>> sometimes have repercussions that are fairly serious, and when they do,
>> it's important that the safety net is already there.
>
> The question is: Are those mistakes worse than the issues caused by NOT
> pushing updates directly to stable?
>
> For example, some regressions slip through testing (this will ALWAYS
> happen, testing is not and CANNOT be perfect)
Perfect is the enemy of good. Our testing will never be perfect, but requiring
that it happen is better than allowing it not to. If it isn't, the answer is
to make the testing better - not to skip it entirely!
> why should our users have to suffer through them for several days
> instead of getting them fixed in the next update push (i.e. as soon as
> possible)?
This is a logically callow statement. Our users do not *suffer* from
non-critical updates being delayed for a short time, nor do they *suffer* from
critical updates getting sufficient testing so as not to immediately require
*another* critical update. At no point in the scenario you paint is there
any actual suffering.
> So my answer is: no, banning direct stable pushes will not improve
> things: for any issue it will prevent, there will be several it will
> introduce!
You haven't actually demonstrated any real problems it will introduce; just
the same (rather thin) strawman over and over.
Given a lack of actual, real problems demonstrated with the bizarro concept
of actually requiring that updates go through our QA infrastructure, the
answer certainly seems to be: yes, absolutely.
--
Peter
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.
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