Res: Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:00:59PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:45 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > here will 
> > ALWAYS be a need for a way to fasttrack regression fixes! 
> 
> The proposals I've seen include a way to fasttrack.  That is you get the
> required karma between the time the update was submitted to bodhi, and
> the time a bodhi admin starts the push.  In such cases your update would
> go directly to stable.  How is that not a fast track?

The Bodhi "karma" system is a very inflexible tool.

Firstly, getting 3 up votes is (probably) easy if you have loads of
users like the kernel, and really hard for the rest of us with
packages which have only a small number of users.  When I have
conscientiously tested the package myself on several machines, my vote
doesn't count at all.

Secondly, a simple linear scale doesn't reflect the complexity of
testing packages.  I've had people downvote my packages because of FAQ
issues or user error or long-standing bugs in some other package that
we can't or don't want to fix; and people downvote packages because of
serious issues that really deserve a BZ as well or instead.

There are also technical problems: You can't fit much text in the
Bodhi text box, and it can't be formatted except as a single
paragraph, and when you do add a comment to help someone it doesn't
seem to be seen by the original downvoter.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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