critpath approval process seems rather broken

[Sven Lankes]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 12:45:56PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:

> And here we are, about to go down the same road again.  I have an update
> in updates-testing, it's getting no love, and the package that's in the
> release is *known broken*.  It has not been updated for systemd to begin
> with.  Nor for tmpfs /var/run.  And just like last time, I put out a
> call for testers on this mailing list.

I had a closer look at the raid setup on my f15-box and as the raid was
up as expected and poking at the raid with mdadm didn't turn up any
issues, I've given it positive karma which has made it "Critpath
approved".

I mostly agree that Fedora as a whole has gone too far in the
restrictions that are put in front of packagers to get updates pushed
out to the distribution (and I'm not even maintaining any critpath
packages). 

Back when this all started I felt that the promise was that "we'll put
all this in place now and once AutoQA is ready, it'll all become much
easier for everyone".

And while AutoQA seems to have come a long way in the last 8 months or
so it's still not ready/solid/... enough to be used to base automatic
decisions on (I'm not complaining - just stating facts) - so I'm still
hopeful that the thumbscrews can be loosened somewhat.

> But like I tried to explain after F14's fiasco, most people simply don't
> have the knowledge and hardware to truly test mdadm.

It doesn't render my system unbootable, my raid still comes up after the
update and casual mdadm calls don't turn up anything suspicious. That is
all what I have tested and I don't feel that it's 'not enough'. The
requirements on testing updates aren't very high - there just aren't
enough testers (also many are testing not-yet-released versions in a vm
and those are most likely not set up with a raid array ...).

> Well, I'm heading out of town for two weeks and will be away from net
> connectivity.  This release's mdadm is what it is and it ain't getting
> any better.

Looking at mdadm I notice two things:

 1. The package doesn't have a single co-maintainer. Having two or more 
      people work on it would make "I'll be gone for two weeks" a non-
      issue. There must be others interested and knowledgeable in the 
      area that could serve as a backup?

 2. You're working on it in bursts - mostly a few weeks before the
      release. Submitting updates (especially rawhide-updates) more
      often would also make things easier right before the release.

-- 
sven === jabber/xmpp: sven at lankes.net