Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part II.

[Spider]

begin  quote
On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 12:39:54 +0100
"Stuart Herbert" <stuart@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:

okay, I'll start this off in a way that probably suits another forum
better, but I can't stop myself after theese posts about QA..

Yes, its a flame.


> > I hope you realise that your desires are conflicting. more
> > ebuilds leads to
> > more unmaintained ebuilds. More QA needs more time.
>
> Rubbish.  Totally utter rubbish.
>
> The right levels of QA *save* time, because things are done
> as-right-as-they-can-be first time.  Instead of time going into bug
> fixing and constantly re-doing what has been done, the time instead
> goes into moving forward, and doing new things.  *Too much* QA just
> bogs the whole thing down, and makes it impossible to get anything
> done in a timely fashion.  The two are very different.

[SNIP]

> What are *your* proposals for addressing this?  I'd like to hear them.



POLITICIAN!!!!! 
Mommy Mommy he's a politishian!! he bashes views without having
information!! POLITICIAN POLITICIAN!!!

*WEEEEE* 

Take the scary man away.

Lock him in a jar and make him read the herds proposals and
implementation which he has obviously heard about (Why else would he
suggest something thats documented as in-progress and then balk out
"What have you come up with? come come show us your ideas! " ) 



*Sigh*

And now for a more structured answer.
No, a well-done QA will -not- let a single developer manage more than
say ~30 builds, and perhaps even less if they are complex. 

At this point one can do two things.  Either kill all packages that are
unmaintained by a herd....  (And hear the whine from the same crowd that
demands proper QA)  ... or give developers to them.

Now, assume that each dev can handle approx ~30 packages, for our 
approx 5000 packages we need around 170 devs.  We dont have that, which
makes a few of our devs overstrained, as well as some packages
unmaintained.

Now add to this that some devs do other work than maintain packages (oh,
gasp ) and you can decimate a few more from our ranks.

So, we can throw more devs into the pool, without doing proper QA on the
devs (which has been in place for quite a while, mentoring programs and
so on)  or handle them as the bugs crop up.

All through this we hear from our QA demanding users.. "MORE PACKAGES
MORE PACKAGES! WE WANT MORE! WE WANT MORE!"   

At this point last we introduced a buffert-zone (testing packages)  and
even stricter rules on packages. No betas, no alphas, no live-cvs. ("but
we want this package, its really cool and actually builds.....  no, I
haven't tried it..."  we hear from some disgruntled bugzilla users)

To throw more devs at the group is something I feel as a foolish thing
if introduced in too rapid succession, sure, some QA might be handled
that way, but we cannot assure the developers QA.

Tinderboxing and automization was in progress but was shot down due to
hardware and maintainability reasons. Oops. 

out of date, we have bugzilla. people use it. of course, some people use
it as if its freshmeat. (dont bother, we subscribe to freshmeat,
-announce lists and others, most of the time packages in active tagging
are updated soon enough. if you find it stale for a week or so, then
poke bugzilla)

Encourage more uipstream manager s to maintain ebuilds.. .*ew* *shudder*

I already get to take bugreports semi-daily from people who in their
$INFINTIE_WISDOM  start using builds from BREAKmyGentoo or other places
in mixture with ~x86, whereby we have to track down a three level
subdependency issue to find the linking error which stemmed from the
interfacechanges in the development series...   (this alone could be
enough to warrant a ramble, I'll avoid that. most of our users deserve
their root account. )



Remember, I am not part of management, or representing the whole devteam
here.  I'm just me.

//Spider
 - irate developer


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