182 pending F11 stable updates. WTF?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Sat May 9 11:23:14 UTC 2009


On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 12:45:14PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> With regard to new packages added to the collection, Fedora is focused on
> quantity instead of quality.

Is it?  I'm a member of the Fedora community, and I think we should be
inclusive about the packages we take, allowing anything which isn't
illegal and which follows the guidelines.  This may mean that packages
duplicate functionality and so forth, so be it.

> The fight against the review-queue leads to metrics (who does the
> most reviews per week?) while nobody measures the quality of the
> reviews and the quality of the released packages.

This is entirely a problem of the Fedora process, that Debian (as an
example) does not have.  We could easily measure the quality of
reviewed packages using mass rebuilds and automated tests, as Debian's
QA team do routinely.

> One can only hope that poor reviews of simple packages like bug
> 494852 will be avoided in the future.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=494852

That is indeed a poor review.  I have no doubt that many other
packages already in Fedora have problems or are inconsistent with the
guidelines.

Debian does much better here by **routine automated testing of the
packages which are in the distribution**.  Relying on the review as
the single hurdle over which all packages must jump, and then having a
complete free-for-all in the distribution -- that's simply bad
process, and not a necessary factor for a Linux distribution.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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