Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Council meeting, Thursday 15th, 1900 UTC

[Curtis Napier]

Lance Albertson wrote:
snip
...
> I tend to agree with Donnie on this partially. Devrel's main focus isn't
> the QA of the tree, its dealing with developers. QA should have the
> authority to limit access to the tree if someone isn't following the
> guidelines properly. They are the ones with the technical know how to
> make the judgment on that. Obviously, they will need to come up with
> guidelines if someone does make a goof up. Give them some probationary
> time, maybe make them take the quiz again to improve their ebuild
> skills. I just don't think devrel is the right place for that kind of
> authority.
>

I'm not an ebuild dev so I may not know enough about this situation to 
competantly comment on it but it seems to me that QA should have some 
sort of limited ability to "temporarily" take away write access to the 
tree until devrel has a chance to look over the evidence and come to a 
decision. This would fix the problem of "devrel takes to long" plus it 
would really help to ensure higher quality work is submitted (because 
ebuild devs WILL stop purposely commiting bad work if they know a QA 
team member can take away their write access at a moments notice for 
repeated violations).

As Lance said in an earlier post, infra already does this "temporary 
removal of access" if it is an immediate security threat and then 
submits the evidence to devrel for followup. Why can't it work exactly 
the same for the QA team? If they have done their due diligence by 
contacting the dev in question, pointing out their mistakes and offering 
assistance to correct the mistakes and the dev just keeps right on 
commiting bad stuff QA should be able to "temporarily" stop them until 
devrel has a chance to follow up and investigate. That's what QA is, 
Quality Assurance, if they have no power to actually "Assure Quality" 
then why does this team even exist?

I'll give an example: Saturn car company has a great big red "STOP" 
button at every point in the assembly line that can turn off the entire 
manufacturing line if QA spots a mistake. The QA team does not have to 
ask anyone first, they simply push the button so the low quality car 
does not get through, remove the offending car from the line 
"temporarily" until a team investigates and decides if the quality is 
good enough to put it back on the assembly line. Saturn is known for the 
quality of it's cars because of this. The gentoo QA team should have 
this same ability.

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