Forum: CFEngine Help Subject: Re: cf-agent 3.3.0 segmentation violation Author: davidlee Link to topic: https://cfengine.com/forum/read.php?3,25804,25815#msg-25815
This raises a wider problem, about the capability (or lack) of the cfengine release management process to react to serious bugs in a swift manner. If this sort of problem strikes, it can be serious for the reporting sites. Suppose a user has a well-established infrastructure, then one day rolls out a perfectly good change which triggers a segv fault across potentially many machines. Even in a good case of having a pre-production testing environment which catches such a segv, this prevents the user from getting his change into production. Worse, it might pass all the pre-prod tests, but then in prod a certain group of machines have a subtly different set of surrounding environment which triggers the fault. (Perfectly possible, because a major purpose, indeed strength, of cfengine is to handle a wide range of diversity in a consistent way, which it is highly unlikely that any pre-prod could realistically mirror.) Such a production-time segv is serious. We ourselves experienced just such a case: see bug 839. Fortunately our pre-prod caught it, but it held us back for over six months. Last October, when we attempted to go from 3.1.4 to 3.2.x, our pre-prod testing of it got such a segv. We were lucky; pre-prod caught it before we had committed anything to 3.2.x. But it could have been worse, as discussed above. (And despite my being on the fringes of the cfengine community, I became aware, despite that remoteness, of three other sites which were affected.) In this case, one of the developers was able to fix the bug quickly (thanks Sigurd!). But the fix wasn't actually released. The lack of the release trapped us for many months on 3.1.4. So could I suggest that the release management process be given the capability to recognise certain types of bug, and their fixes, as critical, and that it be given the capability to release a new delta from the previous baseline, with only those fixes? This current issue would seem to be an ideal candidate for exactly this sort of fast-track delta release management. _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@cfengine.org https://cfengine.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
