Re: QA process was Re: RPM submission procedure

[Timothy John Giese <giese025 tc umn edu>]

I'm brand new to the whole process so I thought it might be useful for 
me to chime in from my perspective regarding the QA process.

I like checklists.  It gives me a good idea of what the expectations 
are.  I followed the instructions at 
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/PackageSubmissionQAPolicy without difficulty.  
Granted, I do not aspire to package hundreds of packages, so I find the 
procedure to not be an obstacle.

Again, I find the checklists useful in reviewing submitted packages.  I 
have followed the instructions from 
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/QAChecklist and used them as a basis for 
reviewing other people's packages.

On the other hand, I feel deterred from reviewing packages.  I am new, 
so I am not a "trusted" developer.  In order for a package to be 
published, it must be approved by 1 trusted developer or 2 untrusted 
developers.  Given the large number of packages and the relatively few 
number of reviewers, I feel that my review provides little help in 
speeding the overall publication of a package (because I suspect other 
untrusted developers are also deterred).  Instead, I feel like any 
review I provide will be available to a *trusted* developer whenever the 
trusted developer gets the time to review the package and will provide 
some assistance to them.... but in terms of the time it takes to publish 
the package, it most likely will not speed up the process significatly 
(the rate-limiting-step is probably the speed at which a trusted 
developer reviews the package). 

An obvious solution would be to have untrusted developers dilligently 
review packages and thus bypass the trusted devlopers; however, I don't 
know what would act to catalyze the motivation for such a response (the 
motivation being: feeling as though the contribution leads to a 
significant speeding of the process).

I believe that the QA submission procedure may change when fedora.us 
becomes fedora extras, so it may be a rash to suggest changes to the 
current submission procedure.  I can only hope that any procedure used 
upon transition of the infrastructure will attempt to address this concern.

Cheers,
Tim Giese