On Sat, 2010-08-14 at 19:14 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Martin Sourada wrote:
> Seeing your mail, you more or less agree with this. So why exactly are
> you against the policy explicitly requiring either positive karma or
> some minimal time in testing (setting aside some current shrotcommings
> of the implementation like resetting the timer on bug update when you
> just add/remove fixed bug or edit update comment)?
There are changes needing a lot (2+ weeks) of testing (e.g. upstream minor
feature releases, such as Qt 4.n+1). There are changes needing some (~1
week, at most 2, of) testing (e.g. upstream bugfix releases / point
releases). There are changes needing no testing (e.g. trivial one-line fixes
for a regression in a previous update which need to go out ASAP to fix the
regression). The maintainer is best qualified to know which applies. The
maintainer is also much better at judging the quality of his updates than
some semi-arbitrary number computed out of tester feedback ("karma"). (He
knows what he changed, he has access to feedback from other places, e.g.
Bugzilla, IRC, mailing lists, upstream's bug tracker, other distros' bug
trackers, anonymous Bodhi feedback not counted towards karma etc. – all
places which can confirm a single patch to fix a reported issue –, he has
experience from previous updates, and he is able to make an educated
judgement call based on all that information.) We are very far from software
being more intelligent than people, so we should let people decide, not
software. And the people should be able to decide on a case by case basis,
not some inflexible bureaucratic policy (which is so dumb that it can even
be enforced by software).
Hrm, I see that software as means to gain feedback for my updates --
noone can be 100% sure his changes are bugfree, otherwise we would have
bugfree software. In the ideal case scenario (which we are far from)
this would be used to catch the regression *before* making that update
stable in the first place. Testers are also giving reasons why they put
-1 karma if they did so. IMHO each change requires at least minimal
testing (and yes, finding at least +1 karma point for one line fix
should not be very hard).
The only thing I don't understand completely (but can accept without
complaining nevertheless) is why this applies to *new* packages as well
-- they didn't existed in repos before and anything is better than
nothing...
Martin