Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] QA Team's role

[Renat Lumpau]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 04:14:33PM -0600, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> I think
> it's fair to say that these QA checks will find problems ranging from
> not-awful-but-annoying to could-break-your-system, but they are all bugs
> that ought to be fixed eventually.  Now, if you're currently working on
> fixing a big problem and thus too busy to fix the little one, that's
> perfectly reasonable, but to not fix a small bug because you know there
> are larger bugs that aren't fixed just seems lazy.

I agree completely. However, ciaranm seems to think that if we don't fix a
whitespace issue immediately, we'll ignore the rest of his QA comments and it's
therefore not worth it to let us know about the bigger issues:

in #gentoo-qa today:
18:39 <@ciaranm> pfff, if they won't fix whitespace, what're the chances of
                 them fixing anything else?

That's an odd position to take.

> So, back to the big issue, are there any real complaints about the QA
> team essentially formulating QA policy?  Should new QA policies instead
> follow the same rules as new global USE flags or eclasses--an e-mail to
> -dev asking for comments first?  Does QA trump, or does the maintainer
> trump when it comes to disputes?

Yes. Here's a quote from Halcy0n (with his permission):

  Don't mistake me not getting involved for approval.  I am just not going to
  get involved in every single dev->dev disagreement, and certainly not when I
  do not have all of the facts.  I wasn't aware that every team leader was
  accountable for how devs on their team behaved.

This is not meant as a comment on Halcy0n's abilities as a team leader, as I
understand he has attempted to manage the issue but "reasonable effort" has
failed.

So, my concern is: if the QA team can't manage its members effectively, should
they be entrusted with tree-wide powers?

-- 
Renat Lumpau       all things web-apps
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