FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 08:07 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> > So yeah, I agree it's not a perfect system - detailed suggestions for
> > improving it would be welcome, I'm sure.
> 
> Alternatives:
> 
> * Abandon it (I don't think this would change anything wrt. to QA in Fedora)

Um. Hard to put this tactfully. You're completely wrong. Being actually
*in* QA I have quite a lot of experience with this, and the Bodhi system
has already stopped lots of broken updates being shipped. Throwing it
out would be insane.

> * Replace it by a "free text comment system"

Well, right now you have the choice of looking at the numbers or just
ignoring them and reading the text (whether to auto-push a release with
a given positive karma is a decision made by the maintainer when pushing
a package, remember, it's not written into Bodhi; so you can choose to
ignore the votes entirely if you like). Doing this would give you a
choice of just reading the text or...just reading the text. Doesn't seem
like an improvement :)

> * In cases an update is trying to address a particular bug in BZ, 
> replace let people comment in bugzilla.

You mean, let people check a box to have their comment from Bugzilla put
into Bodhi? That would be nice, yep. I don't know how difficult it is
from an infrastructure POV. Good idea, though.

> All the voting/karma stuff does is to let rel-eng believe to be dealing 
> with bad updates, while it actually doesn't cope with the problems it is 
> trying to address, it's the wrong tool.

As I said, I just disagree. I have seen many cases where updates that
otherwise would have gone out and caused real pain to real people have
been caught by Bodhi. The fact that some weren't caught by Bodhi doesn't
mean it's useless.

> > I think it's pretty easy to make a case
> > that Bodhi has had a significant positive impact on the overall quality
> > of the updates that have fully utilized it.

> Well, the only positive impact bodhi had on me was bodhi implementing a 
> more or less usable web-frontend, where Fedora had nothing in place 
> before. This doesn't mean it is a good system and even less does this 
> mean this system is perfect or bug-free.

Didn't I just get done saying it's not perfect or bug-free, but that
doesn't mean the sensible answer is to burn it down?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net