Fedora proposal put forward to improve "production stability and incident management"

After a string of annoying incidents after updates causing stability problems on Fedora, there's a new proposal put forward to help improve things.

The new proposal suggests forming a Special Interest Group (SIG) focused on developing a "recommended stream of work to improve our stability and robustness, and to improve our communication with users when problems arise that compromise that stability and robustness".

In the proposal several major update issues are noted that have come up lately including a recent Mesa update that broke launching games from Steam. I only switched to Fedora KDE a few days ago, and was bitten by the Mesa update, and so I was forced into the terminal to downgrade my Mesa version just to get gaming with friends that evening - something that ideally just shouldn't happen.

The chatter on the Fedora Discourse forum around the Mesa update got a little spicy, with the maintainer who actually pushed out this particular Mesa update noting they "don’t consider closed source steam a reliable indicator of issues, it has no debug symbols" which was pretty unhelpful. And later saying "Not my problem anymore, I have quit as rpmfusion admin".

Seems like the proposal good idea, at least to get the ball rolling on things. Their update process currently doesn't seem to work particularly well at times. Issues happen of course, but so many could be avoided with better processes in place. A system cannot be (as the Fedora websites advertises) "Trusted, powerful and easy" and "Reliable" if updates repeatedly break major parts of the system.

Hopefully some good improvements can come out of this.