[maemo-developers] QA from extras-devel to extras-testing

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On May 4, 2009, at 15:04, Murray Cumming wrote:

> On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 13:57 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Andre Klapper wrote:
>>> However packaging is not a product, but one aspect of a product,  
>>> so I'd
>>> prefer to see bug reports filed against the specific product. In  
>>> general
>>> products should (must?) have a bugtracker - otherwise I consider the
>>> developers/maintainers to not be interested in user feedback.
>>
>> This feels like we're trying to re-solve problems that others have  
>> been
>> working on for a long time. Linux distributions have all added some  
>> form
>> of "upstream bug tracker" support.
>>
>> They all keep packaging bugs downstream, though. If there's a problem
>> with your Debian packaging, that problem should get reported to the
>> package maintainer, not the software developer.

Debian does push perl problems upstream to the bug tracker on CPAN  
though. So while bugs may originate in the BTS, they get pushed to the  
responsible party.
>
> I think that varies between distros and packages and upstream modules.
> We can decide what we want to do.

I think we need some form of consensus so that users are not confused.  
If we want to follow Debian, then packaging bugs should get submitted  
to maemo, someone determines if it is a bug in packaging or in the  
upstream software, and pushes it upstream as needed including a bug in  
the maemo bug tracker pointing this out. Then people can at least  
follow the upstream through the maemo bug tracker.

But this might create many more bugs and be hard to manage. Debian has  
had more than half a million bugs filed since their BTS came into  
existence.

There is no reason to follow Debian slavishly, though I think they  
have invented a lot of wheels that might be good to use here, and of  
course I would think that, but I hope I am open to innovation. :P

I do think we need a clearer policy on where packaging bugs go so that  
we can create a workflow to address them.

Jeremiah