Plan for tomorrow's FESCo meeting (2010-11-17)

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2010-11-20 at 11:23 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 10:18:38PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > place. The idea was never that some magic independent group of testers
> > would spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but test updates.
> 
> This idea was never prominently communicated as the default
> situation. Iirc it was said that there are lots of people who want the
> update criteria and will test updates. Making package maintainers now
> start to beg for their updates to be tested is imho just a big waste of
> time. 

> Also there is no dispensable manpower from package maintainers
> available, so requiring them to additionally test each other updates
> manually and to maintain test machines is not a good idea. The whole
> update criteria enforcement only works if there are enough dedicated
> testers that provide extra manpower. Or if the testing is all automated.

I'm looking back through the hideous fesco meeting discussions of this
stuff and I don't see any suggestion that there would be "lots of people
who want the update criteria and will test updates". Granted I may be
missing it, but I can't find it. We set up the proven testers group to
test *critpath* updates, they're not really expected to be any more
likely to test non-critpath updates than anyone else; even there, the
whole point of the proven testers group is to get as many people as
possible to join, and from outside of QA. The last time we went through
this I suggested to the KDE SIG that they have their members sign up as
proventesters so they could test each other's packages, and I know that
at least some of them did sign up; however, it appears that now they
don't want to be bothered to do the testing, if what you're saying is
true for the team.

I really don't see how you can say that testing updates is a 'waste of
time' with a straight face. It *takes* time, yes. It may be boring
sometimes, yes. But a waste of time? Do you write your code perfectly
first time, every time? Does it never have any bugs in it? Are you 100%
confident when you run 'make' that everything's going to pop out the
other end in perfect working order? Or sometimes, just sometimes, do you
screw up, and when the compile fails or the built binary fails to run,
you go 'oops, yeah, better fix that'? That's 'testing', and everyone
does that (at least I really hope they do). Why wouldn't you want to do
the same for packages? Just like code doesn't always come out right the
first time, neither do packages. I really don't see why you think it's a
great idea to push an update of the entire KDE desktop to a stable
Fedora release without any of you actually installing it and checking
that it *works*.

(Now I see that Kevin posted a comment to the update claiming to have
tested it, and it went through. As I said, I think that's fine, so long
as he *actually* tested it; FESCo didn't think so, so if anyone wants to
complain about it, or Luke stops you being able to test your own updates
in Bodhi, we can have another fun argument about that. But at least
*someone* booted the damn thing now!)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net