[maemo-developers] QA process = bug fixing disincentive?

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Saturday 31 October 2009 19:43:40 Andrew Flegg wrote:
> After working 'til stupid o'clock last night on a new version of Hermes,
> today someone's found a bug which'll impact a small number of people. The
> fix is trivial.
> However, I find myself *not* wanting to fix it as it'll need to go through
> another round of testing.

Yeah, I know the feeling. Both as the person who has the silly UID that causes 
problems and as a person who has/had stuff in -testing with 7 karma (collected 
over a week) and  had to seriously consider whether to let the existing 
package go to extras or push the (not significantly altered, with minor fixes 
and more user friendly defaults) version and start karma collection from 0.

There is a definitely a conflict there. I support Jeremiah's suggestion that 
minor packaging/typo fixes that do not alter app functionality (e.g. when you 
go from 1.0-maemo0 to 1.0-maemo1) should not reset app karma. Should require 
some discipline so people would not abuse this, but still better than forcing 
releases to be spaced 10+ days no matter how large the changes or how simple 
the fix.

> Although the principle of resetting package karma to 0 made some sense - as
> any change could fundamentally break the package - it's also true that a
> one-line change to a relatively mature package probably won't change
> whether it's optified; its power usage profile; its package description and
> icon etc.

Yes, there is definitely a sense of throwing out the baby with the bathwater 
here - as is, with a sufficiently mature app, NOT applying simple fixes will get 
the app to the user quicker, and applying the fixes will keep the app AWAY from 
the users.