[arch-dev-public] Arch project management?

[Dan McGee]

On 4/17/07, Jason Chu <jason at 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.

Just my two cents.

-Dan