Re: [gentoo-dev] Local workarounds with no reported bugs

[Daniel Campbell]

On 10/17/2016 06:09 AM, Raymond Jennings wrote:
> My biggest ​opinion regarding workarounds and bugs, is that we're
> sweeping things under the rug that should at least be documented, and
> perhaps fixed...or even punted upstream if its serious enough.
>
> Changing the status quo may require some adjustment though, but I
> suppose we could start by openly documenting a bug if we find a
> workaround that does not already have a bug number associated with it.
> I've seen several ebuilds where workarounds are applied, but the
> workaround also has a bug number in the comment.
I'd say this falls under the scope of QA, and QA should have some sort
of "quick reference" guide to help developers out and cover situations
they've come across. At the moment, the only resource I'm aware of
(aside from the obvious devmanual and PMS) that we have is either
e-mailing qa@g.o or using repoman. repoman can't (and shouldn't) cover
_everything_, but it's hard to take rants like this seriously when
little is done to communicate to devs at large to "color in the lines".

I ran into something similar when writing the wrapper script for
media-sound/apulse. It took 3 attempts and being told "you're doing it
wrong" 2-3 times before I figured out exactly how to do it. Had it been
documented on a wiki page or something similar, it would have saved me
and others a considerable amount of time.

We need solid QA docs. The devmanual and repoman are great starts, and
answer a bunch of questions. When/if QA comes across new situations and
comes up with 'blessed' solutions, we need a way to check them out
instead of waiting for it to hit Git and be smacked with a "this is
wrong" e-mail.

Just my 2¢.

~zlg
-- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
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