[systemd-devel] Bugfix release(s)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mo, 14.01.19 10:59, Jan Synacek (jsynacek at redhat.com) wrote:

> Hi,
>
> since v240 didn't go too well, I would like to suggest that the next one
> (preferably two) release(s) are bugfix only. Please, consider it.

Well, one thing I'd really like to see happen is a bit more feedback
*before* the release from downstreams. Much of the breakage in v240 was
totally avoidable, if downstreams would let us know in advance if
things break.

We do have quite some CI in place now, and it's getting better (some
people are doing great work in that area (Frantisek!), in particularly
finally on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS side), but there are plenty areas
not covered at all, and that's pretty sad. For example the LVM
breakage could have totally been caught beforehand if people would
actually test that... Something is a bit wrong if many of the changes
v240 made have been in the tree for months, but only the day we
finally tag the new release downstreams notice that things don't
actually work on their systems.

It's easy to request that people do more bugfixes, but this work
doesn't come from thin air, it's actual people who need to do the
work, and quite frankly there are exactly two people currently paid
full-time for upstream systemd development, and that limits what we
can from upstream in that area.

I'd love to see some more CI hookup with Arch and Debian for example
(right now there is zero) or even just a git preview package set or so
that interested people can test. Without either it's very likely that
things break on those distros, because there's no way we'll catch
things beforehand.

(That said v241 is going to be a bugfix release mostly, and is
currently being prepared.)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat