[arch-dev-public] package signoffs

[Eric Bélanger]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 09/02/10 18:38, Jan de Groot wrote:
>>
>> These days it looks like almost nobody in our developer team uses i686
>> anymore. I still have a laptop running it, but I barely use it.
>
> I think both architectures are an issues, although I agree i686 is worse.
>  There is rarely a signoff without requiring a bump these days.
>
> As an aside, in the last month there has been five devs signoff for i686
> (me, Eric, Andrea, Vesa, Dan), but I was surprised to see three of these
> still used i686...

It might just be an impression but it seems to me that the signoffs
are mostly done by a small group of devs.  I realize that some of you
are busy/inactive but it would be easier and faster if everyone tried
to do signoffs once in a while.  If we rely on the same 3-4 devs for
signoffs, then if they are busy, inactive, forget or don't use the
package, then the signoff process become stalled.  Therefore, we have
all these bumps in the signoff threads.

As far as i686 goes, if you have a i686 chroot on your x86_64 system
you can do some i686 signoff. Of course, you can't test boot related
packages like the kernel or udev but command line utilities like nano
or wget as well as libraries can be tested and signed off.

One reason that it takes time to get signoffs for certain packages is
that we don't know if enough devs use it to get the required signoff.
For instance, I don't use openvpn. How many devs use openvpn? I don't
know and probably no-one does. A while ago, I started this:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:CoreSignoffs#List_of_potential_signees_for_low-usage_core_packages
to fix that issue but basically no-one bothered to fill it up. If we
would know how many dev use these low usage packages, then we could
automatically send the signoff thread to both the dev ML and to the
arch-general ML and specifically ask for users signoff instead of
waiting for dev signoffs that will never come.

>
>> I think it's time to revise our signoff policy. I was thinking about
>> making it a bit more flexible:
>>
>> - signoff by 3 devs, no matter what architecture, and no bugs within 3
>> days ->  move
>> - signoff for both architectures, 2 each ->  move
>> - no signoff, no bugs for a week ->  move
>
> Sounds fine to me.

same here.

>I know several of us give a "signoff" after a week if
> there appears to be no issues whether or not we use the package...

I did that several time.  I just do a package sanity test.

>
>> For the last thing to get implemented, this can be a bit tricky.
>> Sometimes developers throw something in testing, just to test something,
>> and it sits there for weeks without anyone knowing why it's in testing.
>> I would like to have every package that goes to testing getting
>> committed with a reason in the commit message. This way we can find out
>> why something is in testing and if we can easily move it out without
>> breaking things.
>
> Good commit messages should make the reason for testing clear anyway.
>
> Allan
>