What do rawhide testers want and expect?

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 13:01 -0400, Clyde E. Kunkel wrote:

> I use rawhide daily, primarily for mail, web and document creation.  I 
> also enjoy trying new software in rawhide which leads to some 
> interesting situations.  I like to test the packages in updates-testing 
> as a proven packager, but lately have been afraid to do so since what I 
> think is a problem is criticized as not being a problem 

It's not that it's not a problem, but it's not always something the
update should be held up for. This is partly a problem of the
over-simplistic current Bodhi karma system, but generally, don't -1 an
update unless you're sure the bug you're hitting is a valid reason to
reject the update. At a minimum, it should certainly be a problem which
makes the update *worse* than the package it supersedes. 'The update
doesn't fix bug 123456' is never a reason for a -1 if 123456 was also
present in the previous stable build.

> or if the 
> package works for me but I can't test the bug it fixes then I am 
> criticized for not testing the bug and passing the package on.

You shouldn't be criticized for that, usually, as this isn't really the
function of Bodhi testing. The only time it makes sense is if the update
is non-critpath, and the *sole* change in the update is to fix a single
bug. If the update contains a single bugfix and no other change, then
there's no real point accepting the update unless we know it actually
fixes the bug. If anyone's criticized you for 'not testing that the
update fixes the bug' in any other circumstances, feel free to blow
raspberries at them. =)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net