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

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:11:21 +0000 johnm@g.o wrote:
| On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 05:22:17PM -0500, Mark Loeser
| <halcy0n@g.o> wrote:
| > * The QA team's purpose is to provide cross-herd assistance in
| > keeping the tree in a good state. This is done primarily by finding
| > and pointing out issues to maintainers and, where necessary, taking
| > direct action.
| 
| Please clarify "neccessary". I don't want to see repeat occurances of
| non-issues bogging down real work. Also, please define around this a
| clear and documented policy so when its enforced, its well defended.

The problem is... It's impossible to document every single way in which
someone can screw up. For example, I wouldn't've thought to document
"you should not run mkdir in global scope", because I didn't think
anyone would be daft enough to do it. Policy *has* to rely upon the
basic assumption that developers won't do something crazy.

| > * The QA team may also offer to fix obvious typos and similar minor
| >   issues, and silence from the package maintainers can be taken as
| > agreement in such situations.
| 
| I have no objections, on the understanding that there is a definitive
| understanding of whats being changed and legitimate things aren't
| accidentally replaced.

Example of where this clause would be used, had said bug not been
fixed quickly anyway: bug #122902.

| > * In the case of disagreement on policy among QA members, the
| > majority of established QA members must agree with the action.
| 
| Perhaps pushing it to an open forum on -dev/-core for consensus works
| better here?

The problem with that is, it usually ends up with too many pointless
comments from people saying how things could be fixed in the distant
future, or whining that it isn't explicitly forbidden by policy on
situations where the screwup was too weird to be documented previously.

| > * Just because a particular QA violation has yet to cause an issue
| > does not change the fact that it is still a QA violation.
| 
| Is this a statement or a policy? I assume that if this is policy the
| non-visible issue would go about appropriate scrutany, and in turn a
| long-term solution made in the situation where it is not easily
| resolvable/avoidable.

This is to cover for situations where people claim that their screwups
are ok because no-one has yet reported it as broken.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm