[gentoo-dev] QA guides

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Hi everybody,
I think this is worth to be told here (and maybe also in next week's GWN 
wouldn't be bad, if I'm able to finish what I'm going to promise later in 
this mail). As people could have read on my blog, today I've added a new 
guide under the qa project and added a link from the project page to the 
asneeded fixing guide.
The qa project can be found at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/ , and from 
there it's possible to read the two guides, the aforementioned --as-needed 
fixing guide and the automagic dependency guide.

Why I've started writing those guides? Well mainly because I think we can't 
actually start enforcing some qa if we don't have documented practice; the 
DevManual was a good starting point, but AFAIK it's temporaly unmaintained 
and something more official would be needed to actually start enforcing it.

I'm trying to stick with practical problems and solutions, not going on things 
that are more policy-related, as policies has the bad habit of fleeing out of 
control if not decided with lot of discussions.
Following the two guides that I already put there, I want to write something 
about solving parallel make issues and autotools failures (how many times we 
had bugs stuck with a missing m4 file?).
Of course, enhancement and extensions to those guides are really welcome; devs 
can commit there directly (adding themselves as authors if they add 
substantial doc), but please don't just change them entirely because you 
don't agree with what is written there, if there's something you strongly 
disagree, I'd see better a discussion on gentoo-dev so that all can be 
informed of what it's decided. Users that are wanting to precise something 
because they know the topic (wouldn't be so strange) can send me the 
corrections by mail; I don't think bugzilla is a good place for it because 
the docs product is for user documentation rather than project documentation, 
but if GDP wouldn't mind finding in that product bugs assigned to me about 
those guides, it can be arranged.

I would also ask someone, wither from GDP or not, to please revise the grammar 
and spelling, possibly sending me the correction before committing if they 
seem to change substantial parts of the text.

I really hope those guides can be helpful to people; IMHO the first step to 
have a QA is to provide enough documentation on how things has to be done, or 
people wouldn't know how to do them.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE