Proposal: "automatic blockers"

[Adam Williamson]

Hey, folks. So here's another proposal from an idea that was mentioned 
during the F18 cycle.

There's a few types of blocker bug that are basically no-brainers; it 
doesn't make a lot of sense to waste time in blocker meetings discussing 
them, and more importantly, sometimes they show up and we want to 
quickly accept them as blockers and get the fixes in, but we have to try 
and track down three people to vote +1 before they can be accepted.

So I'm proposing we invent something called 'automatic blockers': a list 
of bug types that can be declared AcceptedBlocker by any single person 
in QA, releng or devel. That decision could of course be challenged and 
changed if needed.

The specific proposal is to add this section to 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_blocker_bug_process , right under 
"Reviewing blocker bugs":

************

== Automatic blockers ==

Certain types of bugs are considered ''automatic blockers''. These bugs 
can be marked as AcceptedBlocker by any member of one of the stakeholder 
groups without formal review. A comment should accompany this change, 
explaining that it has been made under the ''automatic blocker'' policy 
and linking to this section of this page. If anyone believes that a bug 
has been incorrectly marked as AcceptedBlocker in this way, they may 
propose that it be formally reviewed by appending a comment to the bug 
or by raising it during a blocker review meeting. The following types of 
bug are considered ''automatic blockers'':

* Bugs which entirely prevent the composition of one or more of the 
images required to be built for a currently-pending (pre-)release
* Incorrect checksums present on any of the required TC/RC images 
(failures of [[QA:Testcase_Mediakit_ISO_Checksums]])
* Unresolved dependencies on the DVD image (failures of 
[[QA:Testcase_Mediakit_Repoclosure]])
* File conflicts between two packages on the DVD image without an 
explicit Conflicts: tag (failures of [[QA:Testcase_Mediakit_FileConflicts]])
* Complete failure of any required TC/RC image to boot at all - "DOA" 
image (conditional failure is not an automatic blocker)

************

Any thoughts on the general idea, or on the specific list of bug types I 
came up with - any more to add to the list, or remove from it? I don't 
want to make the list _too_ big, and it shouldn't include any type of 
bug that could possibly _not_ be a blocker, we want it to be only the 
completely, 100%, screaming obvious slam-dunks. The last entry is a bit 
of a 'possible' in my mind, there's an argument for not including it, as 
people might interpret it too widely. It's meant to cover only the case 
where we build a TC/RC and it's utterly DOA: the image just flat out 
fails to boot, for everyone, no matter what the hardware or 
configuration, it's just dead.

Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net