Evolution update in F13

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 16:27 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Can anybody tell me what went wrong with this update?  It was submitted
> at 15:09 on 06-23, then made it into testing at 16:19 on 06-24 and was
> submitted for stable two hours later.  Between that submission and the
> push to stable (push to stable happened at 18:09 on 06-25) numerous
> negative karma came in due to broken deps.  The update went out anyway,
> and now we have a mess of broken updates on a critical path package, and
> have to scramble to fix it with more updates, on a Friday.
> 
> Can anybody help me understand the scenario here?  Should we start
> filtering out push requests that have more than -2 karma?

I talked to notting &c about this earlier, and we've hit this situation
before. The 'scenario' is simply that there's really no screening
between 'submit' and 'push' for stable updates, and this one was
submitted to stable before any negative karma came in. There's no
reliable process whereby whoever's doing the push to stable actually
looks at feedback before doing it; unless they happen to have been made
aware that a particular package shouldn't be pushed, they just push
everything that's been submitted.

Clearly the maintainer did not allow sufficient time for testing here;
there's a grand 4 hour window between the update being 'pushed to
testing' and 'submitted to stable'. That probably wasn't long enough for
it even to hit any public mirrors.

AutoQA will also help a lot here, obviously, when it's fully
implemented. If implemented as planned, the depcheck tests would have
prevented the update from being pushed.

The requirement for proventester feedback for critpath updates, when we
turn it on, should also catch problems like this in the critpath. Evo
isn't critpath, though, I believe.

Until AutoQA is in place to tackle this, the obvious option is for there
to be a process improvement whereby whoever's doing stable update pushes
at least gets notified if a package has received negative karma since
the submission. I think we discussed something similar on -devel last
time this happened. Not sure if there's a ticket, or how hard that would
be to implement.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net