Refining the update queues/process [Was: Worthless updates]

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 22:16 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:33:02 -0800, Adam wrote:
> 
> > > No, not in a clear way. Instead, you keep emphasising that no negative
> > > feedback is not equal to a package not having been tested at all. That's
> > > just plain useless. Not even all broken deps are reported in bodhi.
> > 
> > Why do you keep talking about 'all', as if the condition for success is
> > catching 'all' errors?
> 
> That is your claim.
> 
> In my comments it isn't universal quantification, but existential
> quantification (∃). There is an update, which is still without feedback
> after two weeks, and I cannot conclude anything about how much testing it
> may have seen. That's very different from your "[...] most packages that
> go to updates-testing for a few days *are* being tested, even if they get
> no apparent Bodhi feedback. [...]" 

Ah. You're looking at it on a kind of micro level; 'how can I tell this
package has been tested?'

Maybe it makes it clearer if I explain more clearly that that's not
exactly how I look at it, nor (I think) how the rest of QA sees it, or
what the proposal to require -testing is intended to achieve. We're
thinking more about 'the big picture', and we're specifically thinking
about - as I said before - the real brown-paper-bag,
oh-my-god-what-were-they-thinking kinds of regressions, the 'systems
don't boot any more', 'Firefox doesn't run' kinds of forehead-slappers.
What we believe is that requiring packages to go to updates-testing for
some time improves our chances of avoiding that kind of issue.

Obviously, the more testing gets done in updates-testing, the better.
Hopefully Till's script will help a lot with that, it's already had a
very positive response. But the initial trigger for the very first
proposal from which all this discussion sprang was wondering what we
could do to avoid the really-big-duh kind of problem.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net