old_testing_critpath notifications

[Matt McCutchen]

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 14:17 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> [...] I think we need to be
> careful of the mindset that says 'we can't enforce any standards in
> Fedora because it's a volunteer project so we must just accept what
> people are willing to give us'.
> 
> Even though packaging in Fedora is a volunteer process, we still have
> fairly rigorous packaging guidelines and a review process. We don't just
> accept any package someone turns up and submits. i.e., we're enforcing
> standards of quality, despite this being an entirely volunteer effort
> and no-one being compelled to show up and provide packages of a
> particular quality.
> 
> The concept of having a policy requiring updates to be tested before
> they're issued is really no different.

Correct in the sense that Fedora has the authority to impose both
policies.  The costs and benefits of each policy are still open for
debate.

> I do think that for update testing to work well going forward we need to
> engage more groups with it and make it clear it's not something that
> some separate QA group is just going to do for everyone and no-one has
> to worry about it.

That's easy to say.  The fact remains that if no one feels they have a
sufficient incentive to do the work of testing an update for a
particular Fedora version, it simply won't get tested.

> When software is packaged it's reasonable to expect that someone,
> somewhere, uses it; if they don't, it probably shouldn't be packaged. We
> need to find those people and engage them in the testing process, and it
> seems to me that the maintainers of packages are as well placed as
> anyone to help find and engage their users in this process.

The argument sounds reasonable on its face, but apparently some (many?)
maintainers don't agree.  Pestering them does not seem to be helpful.
We have the option to take away their ownership of the package,
potentially resulting in it getting dropped from the distribution if
another maintainer can't be found, but again we have to ask whether the
benefits outweigh the costs.

-- 
Matt