f-e-k improvement discussion continued

[Bob Lightfoot]

Message: 12 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:05:12 -0700 From: Adam Williamson 
<awilliam at redhat.com> Subject: Re: test Digest, Vol 77, Issue 32 To: For 
testers of Fedora development releases <test at lists.fedoraproject.org> 
Message-ID: <1279227912.1985.40.camel at adam.local.net> Content-Type: 
text/plain; charset="UTF-8" On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 22:13 +0200, Till Maas 
wrote:

> >  Yes, but what exactly do you want to have? If you do not want to test
> >  updates for a certain package ever, just remove the package from the
> >  machine. And if the package is already installed and did not cause any
> >  trouble (e.g. because of broken deps or conflicts), then afaik a zero
> >  karma comment is ok.
> >  
> >  So would it be enough to have a short-cut for this 0-karma comment with
> >  a predefined text or should this new command make f-e-k create a local
> >  list of updates to ignore?
>    
No. As I wrote in my initial mail, I've had one maintainer complain
already about having lots of (to them) useless 0 karma comments on an
update. Comments saying 'I can't really test this but it didn't break
boot' are kinda useful for critpath updates, but really useless for
non-critpath updates which we would never expect to break boot in the
*first*  place. The only kind of feedback that's useful for those is
feedback from people who've actually tested the package directly.
Posting useless 0-karma comments just to make the package not show up in
f-e-k any more is kind of an abuse of process, because f-e-k is just a
helper widget, the real point of the process is the public feedback it
generates, and if we generate useless feedback just to make our helper
widget happy, we're not contributing anything positive.

I do agree with 'just remove the package', but there might be cases
where the tester has it installed for some real reason but isn't exactly
sure how to manually exercise it, for those cases it'd be nice to have a
'please don't show me this one again' button, I think.
-- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: 
adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net 
BobLfoot's next comment: I just ran yum update 
--enable-repo=updates-testing --skip-broken -y and when I went to run 
f-e-k I was presented with three packages to provide feedback on. 1) ppp 
2) xorg-x11-xinit 3) xsane-common and xsane-gimp. 1) I've never used ppp 
networking so this would be a package I'd of karma 0 and "not tested" 
comment prior to Adam's request that we not do so. The suggestion to 
"just remove the package" is unacceptable in this case also since yum 
erase ppp wipes out Network Manager. So not testing would be a nice 
choice here for me rather than having to skip it every time. a karma of 
I or 7 which didn't factor into the total karma math but caused the 
system not to represent works great. 2) I run x on my VM but don't know 
if I have an Xorg file or not and wouldn't have a clue how to test for a 
missing bang to shebang unless the developer choose to publish a test 
protocol. So not testing would be a nice choice here also, but I guess 
I'll just have the annoyance of skipping this going forward. 3) Xsane 
will get tested before I provide feedback, I have an HP flatbed 
connected and will exercise xsane. Small sample but must pass over 2/3 
to get to the one that counts. Does anyone else encounter or follow my 
point?

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