Blocker Review discussion tickets -- now available

[Kamil Paral]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to announce a new project of the QA team and an extension of the
BlockerBugs App [1]. The blocker and freeze exception proposals can now not
only be discussed during regular blocker review meetings [2], but also at
any time through discussion tickets hosted on Pagure [3]. So even if you
don't have time to participate in the meeting, you can still participate
and vote in those discussion tickets.

This will be mostly interesting to people who participated in blocker
review meetings in the past, but we hope we can attract new participants
this way. It is also very useful for package maintainers and developers,
because they can now easily provide feedback regarding a proposed blocker
or a freeze exception without attending a meeting at a particular time or
diluting a technical discussion in Bugzilla.

To participate, open the BlockerBugs App for a particular milestone (e.g.
F33 Beta [4]) and you'll see "Vote!" and "Discuss" links for
proposed/accepted blockers and freeze exceptions. Follow the links to see
tickets where you can express your opinion (which should ideally reflect
our release criteria [5]). You can vote according to the guide present at
[3], please read it carefully. A bot is following each ticket, updating the
voting summary, and accepting certain commands. Watching the Pagure repo
[3] also gives you the option to get notified about every new proposed
blocker/freeze exception.

We've been using these discussions for a week or two now (I apologize for a
late announcement) and so far our existing practice seems to be to vote for
proposals throughout the week using these discussion tickets, close those
which we can easily get enough votes and agree on, and discuss the
remainder during the next blocker review meeting. So the regular blocker
review meeting hasn't been replaced, but we use the discussion tickets to
cut down on the meeting length. We're still trying to figure out the best
approach to take here, so nothing is set in stone. The voting functionality
itself is also still in development, we'll try to provide new features and
improve the experience based on your feedback.

I'll be happy to answer questions, if there are any.
Thanks,
Kamil
Fedora QA

PS: Development credits go to Lukas Brabec, Frantisek Zatloukal, Tim Flink,
Josef Skladanka and Adam Williamson.

[1] https://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_blocker_bug_process
[3] https://pagure.io/fedora-qa/blocker-review
[4] https://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/milestone/33/beta/buglist
[5] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Criteria