#1 Complaint about Ubuntu: Updates break things

[Martin Pitt]

Bryce Harrington [2008-12-19 12:44 -0800]:
> When did this happen?  I cannot recall ever seeing a binary X driver
> update accepted by the SRU team.

That was actually the case twice in intrepid so far (for
nvidia-graphics-drivers-{96,177}. Due to the nature of these drivers,
there are often regressions for particular cards between Ubuntu
releases, and then dozens of people start yelling "OMG how can you not
update this, it's working perfectly". And Bryce is right, we can't do
much else than rely on broad testing, since we can't control the
changes to those drivers.  Proprietary driver updates haven't happened
to hardy yet.

As a general explanation about the frequency of updates: Intrepid was
such an exceptionally buggy release again, mostly because it just got
3 months of attention from many core devs (many were involved fulltime
for working on 8.04.1). So it was the counterpart to edgy, and many
bugs were so bad that they fulfilled the SRU filter without any
problems. Due to many people still being on intrepid, we have allowed
more SRUs right after the release than usual. It will go back to normal now.

If updates really cause so much grief, we should indeed move to a more
strict SRU practice again. However, a general comment "SRUs suck"
isn't helpful at all. We have never pushed anything to -updates with
at least one third party confirming that the update still works, and
we do have quite a bunch of people testing -proposed (which can be
seen from the number of bug reports we get if something in -proposed
actually reportedly breaks, which fortunately is very rare from my
perspective).

So I do appreciate the general feeling that SRUs have to become
stricter again, and we have to resist the urge of people wanting their
latest bug fixes in. But for actual regressions we need much more
detailled feedback.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas!

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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