On Tue, 2023-09-05 at 12:30 +0200, Kamil Paral wrote:
Lately we've seen a surge of FTI (fails to install) bugs being proposed as freeze exceptions [1] [2]. We generally grant them, because we want the base repo to be in a consistent and buildable state. However, I wonder, isn't this approach mostly relevant for the Final release? Does it make sense to also have this approach for Beta?
The reason why I'm thinking about this is because of course there's some work connected with granting and processing these freeze exceptions (FEs). But at the same time, updates-testing is enabled by default, so users can get the fixed versions immediately, and the fixes can be pushed stable right after the Beta freeze is over. Is the extra FE-related work justified?
updates-testing is not enabled by default for the upgrade.
The upgrade process uses whatever repos are enabled *in the current configuration*. So in the "typical" case, you are upgrading from a stable Fedora release with default repo configuration, in which updates-testing is not enabled. Thus updates-testing is not used for the upgrade.
This is why we have the policy of accepting clean FTI fixes during Beta freeze.
I'd like to propose an alternative change: we should make clean FTI cases "automatic freeze exceptions". By "clean" I mean cases where the package was, practically speaking, useless before the fix. Cases where it's just one subpackage of a larger package that was FTI should still be manually checked, especially if the changes are larger than just a straight targeted fix to that subpackage (e.g. a version bump).
That way I or Frantisek or whoever can just tag them accepted as they come in and we don't have to bother voting...
Or perhaps we can grant FTI FEs automatically? Either always, or in some cases?
...oh yeah, that. :D