Proposed udpates policy change

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 06:45:49PM -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 3) Sufficient testing of software inherently requires manual
> >> intervention by more than one individual.
> >>
> > This isn't entirely true either.
> 
> #3 is so true that is central to what distros are about. Upstream
> probably released a good updated version, but the distro role is to do
> the integration, and shake out all the bugs in those subtle
> interactions between components.
> 
> Otherwise, distros could provide the installer + @base and for the
> rest we could all grab RPMs from upstreams' websites.
> 
> The QA of the integrated set of packages at particular release is hard
> and complex. That's what Fedora does, as a distro, and is central to
> what Fedora is, and the implicit social contract -- these components
> perform together in tune like a well-rehearsed orchestra.
> 
> If the trombonist buys a new and shiny trombone, great, but for the
> piece he's playing tonight he'll have to play with the old trombone.
> The new trombone may be slightly out of tune, or louder, or tinnier;
> none of those things are bad per se, but it will ruin the combined
> effort.
> 
> > One person can manually evaluate
> 
> That's the "it works for me" attitude. Works for small software
> projects with a couple users. Not for a hugely complex OS, one that
> others use as the base for their own work.
> 

If you had bothered to quote my complete proposal you would find that you
didn't have to bother writing your message.  I'll pull a Jef and quote it:

> > This isn't entirely true either.  One person can manually evaluate the
> > impact of certain changes to certain pieces of software.  But this is less
> > of an issue than the first axiom as the number of packages that fit this
> > category is likely to be small.

You're willing to say that if I update one of my packages that has a script
of 30 lines, is a leaf node, and the update is to give the script an
optional argument to print output to stdout instead of writing to a file
that I'm incapable of building that package and then QA'ing the package from
the update-testing repository?

I'm specific that this is not a major problem because the number of packages
that can fall into this category is small.  But #3 is not a sterling example
of an axiom as there are packages in the repository where small changes can
be applied and tested for regressions by a single person.

-Toshio
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