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

[Mark Loeser]

Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> said:
> On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 16:14 -0600, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> > 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?
> I think the QA team is free to classify QA bugs, but any changes should
> be pushed to the -dev ML just so that everyone is aware what is
> happening. It's a bit, well, annoying if QA decides that we have to use
> the Wrong Bracing Style in eclasses and files 50 bugs for cosmetic fixes
> while there are ebuilds doing evil things, but if there's a warning
> ("We'll file bugs on Saturday if there are no objections to removal of
> mkdir in global scope") I can live with that. Also QA should not just
> decide on something without a documented explanation - it will erode
> their credibility as it is seen as a random process unless there is
> documentation.

As I said, we plan on documenting everything as we find problems.  I
also don't expect us to be capable of creating completely new policies
off in some corner and just surprise people with them.  Communication
with the rest of Gentoo is going to be needed, but I am not sure of the
best possible way to get things "approved".  I think if something we find
is highly questionable, that we should be able to "fix" it if possible,
until such a time when a decision can be reached.  (more on this below)

> In case of dispute in general QA should be stronger than a single
> maintainer, but combined with the fact that QA also creates policy that
> would be a bit tricky. Disputes should be escalated along the normal
> devrel dispute lines I think, just think of QA as another herd/project
> and that mostly makes sense :-)

Devrel is really for non-technical issues, and for dev->dev problems.
I would like to see enough trust in the QA team to be able to make these
decisions on its own, instead of making one team responsible for
everything (devrel).

> QA is still new, so the communication channels might not be perfect- I
> hope everybody manages to cooperate so that Gentoo is the least buggy
> distro of them all when 2006.1 comes out ;-)

Thanks, hopefully enough people have faith in us to do the right thing
so that we can get everything fixed up that we can.

-- 
Mark Loeser   -   Gentoo Developer (cpp gcc-porting qa toolchain x86)
email         -   halcy0n AT gentoo DOT org
                  mark AT halcy0n DOT com
web           -   http://dev.gentoo.org/~halcy0n/
                  http://www.halcy0n.com