old_testing_critpath notifications

[Doug Ledford]

On 11/30/2010 05:50 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at
> <mailto:kevin.kofler at chello.at>> wrote:
> 
>     Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>     > I am sorry but "somebody does not did his job"?  It is not the
>     "job" of
>     > anyone to test packages for you.  They are merely helping out and we
>     > will get more help if we express gratitude instead of a sense of
>     > entitlement.
> 
>     But this is exactly why the current policy which REQUIRES testing is
>     broken.
> 
> 
> Repeating your view point over and over again is not going to win a
> conversation.  You believe that it is fine to test for Fedora 14 and
> push for Fedora 13 without testing for that release explicitly.  So I am
> not surprised you are against making testing a requirement.  Obviously,
> we have different perspectives here. 
> 
> Rahul
> 

I'll jump on Kevin's boat for this argument.  The current policy
*mandates* testing before we are allowed to push a package out.  If we
don't get the right testing (which we can't do ourselves), then a
critpath package is held up.  So, it damn well better be *somebody's*
job to perform crit path testing, otherwise the current policy creates a
roadblock to release with no guarantee that the roadblock will ever get
cleared.

That being said, F14 went out with a broken mdadm *purely* because of
this policy.  The mdadm I had in updates-testing was far better, and has
been reported by probably six or eight users now to completely solve
their problems (only one person didn't get their problem solved by the
update in updates-testing, and no new problems were reported by anybody)
across 3 or 4 different bugs.  It was ready in time, but didn't get the
appropriate testing in time.  And I *knew* it was better than what we
had, even without the testers telling me so, because the updated package
fixed a known race issue in file handling that was all too easy to hit
whenever udev was allowed to spawn more than one mdadm -I instance at a
time (aka, about 80% of the time you hit the race condition, and the fix
was known to solve the problem 100% of the time).  But my hands were tied.

So, for anyone that cares, I will posit a maxim that you can't create a
policy that creates an unbreakable roadblock without also creating
either A) a job who's responsibility it is to clear said roadblocks in a
reasonable period of time or B) lifting the roadblock after a reasonable
period of time regardless of whether the conditions of the restriction
were met or not.

Evidently my update was approved somewhere along the way, but because of
the volume of bodhi spam I get, I missed it.  So I'm not sure if it
could have made F14 final or not, but I know it didn't because I was
working on other things at the time.

Bodhi critpath restrictions == -1000 in their current form as far as I'm
concerned.  Fix it as you see fit, but it definitely needs fixing.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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