[maemo-developers] Quality Assurance and Extras-testing discussion on IRC

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> writes:

> Reporting all bugs found is great.  But only "dangerous" issues should
> cause blockages.

My gut feeling is that a specific bug report should always be required
to block a package from entering Extras.

I.e, the logic would be "A package can pass into Extras when there is no
critical issue reported for this package, and we have been looking hard
enough to be confident that no critical issue is hiding."

The "enough" qualification in "looking hard enough" could be controlled
with karma, but input from the developer is always needed, if only to
reset the packagw karma at the appropriate time.

We can modify that to be "A package can pass into Extras when it has
less critical bugs reported than the version currently in Extras (or
both have zero), and we have been looking hard enough to be confident
that no further critical issues are hiding."

This is what Debian does, and we might need to do it too, eventually,
since it will happen that critical issues will be found in Extras and
then we have to weigh the ciritical issues in extras-testing somehow
against those in extras and decide which version we want to have in
extras.  We can also leave this open and require a manual decision in
these cases.

In any case, this puts a lot of weight on the bug reports, and there
will be cases of "is not a bug!", "is, too", "ok, is fixed", "is not!",
"yeah, but is not critical", "mofo, it is! for me!"  fights and we have
to settle them.  Maybe that is something where karma can help, too.

So, hmm, I think this all means that I want developers and testers to
have karma, not packages.  A developer with high karma would be able to
push packages through the process faster, and a high rolling tester
would be able keep bugs open and classified as critical in case of
disagreement.