On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 01:52:11PM -0400, Dan McGee wrote:
On 4/17/07, Jason Chu <jason@archlinux.org> wrote:
A lot of people have been saying that quality control in Arch has gone down the crapper (gotten worse, for the non-native english speakers). Obviously we can't test everything on everyone's machine or even test all the features of all of our packages, so what can we do?
Someone suggested that we have someone who manages quality control. I don't like thinking of it as a procedural problem, so I'm going to phrase it differently. I think we need someone who makes sure that things don't get forgotten, by the developers and by the community. Someone to prod the devs and the community to test things and make sure things don't get lost.
Roman already does this very very well for the bug tracker. Since we hired a bug hunter, bugs get addressed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hassigned very quickly. What if we had the same thing for the larger/more important packages, like kernel26, glibc, apache, everything in core?
The idea isn't to just throw process at the problem, but to be a little more organized in our package verification. I don't care how the organizer does it either, just as long as they make sure that people are happy with changes before they go into current/extra.
I'm not suggesting any of the developers do this either, we need someone new who isn't maintaining packages, already busy with Arch developer stuff, and is active in the community.
Everyone has 1 week to get their comments in before I start looking.
Jason
This is not quite the same, but quite related- I feel that the testing repo is not used as often as it should be for single-package upgrades. We have been tending to use it for large rebuilds, but you don't see packages hit testing near as often when it is all by itself. I don't like having hard and fast rules on when a move through testing is appropriate. Having bleeding-edge packages is great with this distro, but having broken-edge packages is not so hot.
[testing] also needs more testing from end-users. Python 2.5 was in testing for a long time. But most bug reports appeared after the move to [current]. Every dev. appreciates patches. Jürgen