critpath approval process seems rather broken

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Sonntag, den 10.04.2011, 23:12 +0200 schrieb Kevin Kofler:
> Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > As someone who is still suffering from the KDE 4.6.1 update and who has
> > not received notable support from your or the KDE SIG I object to
> > lowering the test requirements for updates.
> 
> Uh, we're doing what we can about the Akonadi issues. The thing is, we 
> cannot reproduce them, 

But I can and I haven't seen any instructions what I should do. I am
willing to try broken update again in order to provide more info, but I
can only provide the info I am asked for.

> nor could the users who tested 4.6 before we pushed 
> it. (We've had even prereleases available in the kde-unstable repository, 
> then 4.6.0 and 4.6.1 in kde-testing. Several users tested those. kde-
> unstable also had kdepim 4.6, but several people excluded it specifically. 
> kde-testing shipped 4.6.0 with kdepim 4.4.10, exactly the combination we 
> pushed to F14.

This is the problem: It was one huge update, so when a person gives +1,
you have no idea what he actually tested. We don't know if the people
tested kontact at all, they just approved the huge update and might not
even have kdepim installed.

> The update was also in updates-testing for 11 days total and 
> had a karma of +2, with 2 -1 comments about regressions which were both 
> fixed in the version we pushed to stable, and 4 +1 comments. One of the +1 
> votes was from a proventester, so this update would have fulfilled even the 
> stricter requirements for critical path packages.) It's hard to fix an issue 
> we cannot reproduce.

This means we need more testing rather than less, so your suggestion to
remove "red tape" is counterproductive.

> We tried a fix from upstream to solve Akonadi-related problems, which wasn't 
> developed for your exact issue, but which we thought might have helped too. 
> It turns out it didn't help. (It does fix an annoyance other users were 
> encountering though.)
> 
> We cannot do all that much more on our end. Have you talked to kdepim 
> upstream? As far as I know, you actually know the kdepim developers better 
> than we do… The upstream developers are the people most likely to be able to 
> do anything about your problem. It's hard to fix an issue in code we didn't 
> develop.

I don't expect you to know the code but as the maintainers I expect you
to be able to give me some debugging instructions that you would then
use to get in touch with the developers.

I haven't met them again because I only see them once a week and when I
do, I will try to get some help there. As a matter of fact you pushed a
very hairy update to a stable release and it broke for some people, so
you are not in the position to demand less testing.

> And aren't you the one who wanted us to ship F15 with kdepim 4.6 beta? (Yes, 
> it's still in beta, even now, and I doubt it will be out of beta when F15 
> releases. F15 will ship with kdepim 4.4.x.) 

No, I wanted to ship the final, not the beta because I relied on my
colleagues.

> Yet when I suggested trying that to see whether it works any better, you dismissed 
> my suggestion as an insane one.

Trying what?

Regards,
Christoph