Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 09:16:03 Jeremy Blosser wrote:
> On Mar 07, Eric Sandall [eric AT sandall.us] wrote:
> > Jeremy,
> > While you do have a good point, I still believe my point is valid. While
> > we do not hand-hold our users with configurations and setups, we *do*
> > lead them to expect spells to cast with the defaults, and for fixes in
> > spells to be applied so that future casts work (hence the implementation
> > of UPDATED/PATCHLEVEL in Sorcery). I view it as a Bad Thing (TM) for us
> > to be telling users to recast a package to obtain a fix as they should
> > *never* have to come into IRC, the forums, or our mailing lists asking
> > why something doesn't work when we have the fix and failed to have the
> > fix applied to their system.
>
> I know you think it's a bad thing, but you aren't really addressing the
> points about why the alternative can also be a bad thing.  Both approaches
> have issues, the weight of the issues varies depending on the individual
> environment.  It's a much bigger problem for me to have to rebuild glibc 3
> extra times on every box because a man page moved or something than it is
> to have to search bugzilla or ask a question when some side feature doesn't
> work on first blush.  Expecting people to hit a knowledge base or bugzilla
> when looking for solutions is not at all uncommon, and we expect people to
> do that today for any fixes that haven't made it from test to stable yet.

That's very true, and I thought I had addressed it, but to make it clear, in 
my opinion, the extra compiling is worth it, for me. ;) Others, obviously 
disagree (and do have valid reasons). I don't believe in expecting users to 
peruse bugzilla in order to have a working box as being conducive to 
encouraging more users to try out/stay with SMGL.

> > For people with slow systems (who should already know that they're going
> > to be spending a lot of time compiling) and people who check every
> > update, we have `sorcery queue-security`. There is no reason not to use
> > PATCHLEVEL to force packages to be queued when that'd fix a current or
> > future problem.
>
> There are bugfixes that have nothing to do with security that absolutely
> need to present themselves as critical updates.  The recent business of
> apache2 moving its default files around is a prime example.  Yes, that was
> a file move, but it was a file move that broke production systems because
> it included things like the existing conf files and document roots being
> ignored.

A corner case, I would say, but then, my firefox issue also is a corner case.

Perhaps we should come up with a usage policy for PATCHLEVEL that pleases the 
both of us:
* PATCHLEVEL will always be incremented if there is a change to the location 
of installed files
* PATCHLEVEL will always be incremented if other packages always require this 
change to work
* PATCHLEVEL may be incremented on a case-by-case bases for other uses (such 
as a new configuration option)

-sandalle

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  http://counter.li.org/  #196285

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