Greetings testers! It’s meeting time again. I may not be around to run it, though. If I don’t make it and anyone else wants to run it, please go ahead, it’s easy! The SOP is here. I didn’t have anything particular to discuss, just a quick status check-in as usual.
If anyone has any other items for the agenda, please reply to this thread and suggest them! Thanks.
@boniboyblue the question mark was there for a reason, it was to indicate the meeting might not happen if I’m not around and nobody else wants to run it
A topic that is very close to my heart and that I would like to see discussed by the Fedora quality team is that of updating packages. I’ve been saying this for a long time and, taking a look around the forum, it’s clear that I’m not the only one who’s noticed it: packages don’t receive updates with the same punctuality. There are very precise maintainers and very late maintainers. I understand that this is a job mostly done by volunteers, but I believe that something must be done to change this trend.
The last on the list was Firefox which received a late update that fixed several critical issues, with the F43 version lagging behind the F44 and F42 versions. I could also mention Thunderbird which is years behind with updates! In short, it is a situation that needs to be investigated and remedied. In any case, several packages are updated weeks or months after the upstream release.
I know that many people don’t like my proposal, but honestly I haven’t found a better one: use an auto-update tool as often as possible and no manual intervention from the maintainer is required. There are distros and repositories that use this approach and there are no major problems (keeping in mind that, in any case the package should go through testing first). I believe Packit can already do this.
That’s not really in scope for the quality team. We do not tell packagers how often they ought to update their packages, or deal much with security issues. We are mostly concerned with whether the software works.
We already have a thread for the Firefox issue, where one of the maintainers has recently posted to explain the situation. I honestly think it got blown a little out of proportion. A couple of updates were slower because of a change to how Firefox updates get done (a change I’d been asking the maintainer to make for years, actually) combined with a scripting issue. A couple of updates being a few days slower than usual does not constitute a systemic issue.
