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
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