bug#27264: gnome-shell-3.24.2 consistently dies during initialization

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Ludovic,

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>
>> I'm annoyed that I've been forced to either use a different desktop
>> environment in the meantime or else sacrifice security updates.  I would
>> never consider pushing such a major update to master without testing it
>> first.  I'm astonished that anyone thinks that this is acceptable
>> behavior.
>
> I sympathize, and I agree that it sucks.
>
> Now, I think we are all guilty.  Rather than trying to find someone to
> blame, I’m more interested in seeing why we got there and what we can do
> to avoid it in the future.  Of course we can call for GNOME users to
> test it, and we’ll surely do that explicitly in the future.  But IMO we
> should be thankful to those who worked on this upgrade branch,

I agree that we should be thankful, and I'm sorry for not saying so in
my last message.  I'm very grateful to Marius and Kei for their
excellent work upgrading GNOME to 3.24.  I handled the upgrade to 3.22,
so I know how much work that is, and I'm glad to have been spared the
effort this time around.  I'm also grateful to Marius, Kei, and Roel for
their work on the final commits to get GNOME working.

Finding someone to blame is not my goal.  Like you, my goal is to avoid
this mistake in the future.  I don't see how to do that without calling
attention to the mistake and labeling it as such.  I did not mention any
names in my complaint.

>                                                                and I
> feel it would be unwise to sit back and add more on their shoulders.

It is not my intent to add more to anyone's shoulders.  I'm not asking
anyone to do anything.  I'm asking people *not* to do something.  I'm
asking people not to merge major upgrade branches without testing them
first.  Merging major upgrade branches is not something that should be
done without sufficient care.  If you aren't able to do the job
carefully, then don't do it.  That's not adding to anyone's shoulders.
No one is imposing deadlines on us, and this was not a security update.

I'm not sure why you think "we are all guilty".  Is it because we have a
collective responsibility to merge 'staging' more quickly than would be
possible if we waited for someone to test it first?  If so, I disagree.

On the contrary, I believe we have a responsibility to make sure major
upgrade branches are tested before they are merged, because a broken
'master' effectively means that we cannot deploy security updates to
users until the problem is fixed.

Does that make sense?

       Mark