New bodhi release in production

[Kevin Kofler]

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).

        Kevin Kofler