no mandatory QA testing at all [Re: crazy thought about how to ease QA testing]

[David Eisenstein]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Pekka Savola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It seems there's rather strong agreement for this.
> 
> Unless I hear major objections in two days, I'll start the two-week 
> clock (from today) for all the pending packages.
> 
> After that I'll also update the Wiki entry for QaVerify unless someone 
> else has done it.

> On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> >>> I have proposed something simpler, and still do:
> >>>
> >>> 1) every package, even without any VERIFY QA votes at all, will be
> >>>     released automatically in X weeks (suggest: X=2).
> >>>
> >>>     exception: at package PUBLISH time, the packager and/or publisher,
> >>>     if they think the changes are major enough (e.g., non-QAed patches
> >>>     etc.), they can specify that the package should not be
> >>>     automatically released.
> >>>
> >>> 2) negative reports block automatic publishing.
> >>>
> >>> 3) positive reports can speed up automatic publishing (for example: 2
> >>>     VERIFY votes --> released within 1 week, all verify votes:
> >>>     released immediately after the last verify)
> >>>
> >>> <<snip>>
> >
> > I agree to this.
> >
> > Marc

Let's give this a try.  I hear very few complaints about the packages that
Fedora Legacy Project produces.  

It is good to have the option of letting the package builder say, "Hey,
someone who knows this thing I built, please try it out!"  It's impossible
for the folks on our build team to be intimately familiar with all the
packages we build; there are too many of them and too few builders so far.

In many cases, packages just work, because we are depending on the
excellent work of others (either upstream or Red Hat engineers' work) in
creating patches that work and that don't introduce other problems, as
Pekka has noted elsewhere.

Doing things this way may have the unfortunate effect of pretty much doing
away with QA Testing, though.  If a package is going to be released two
weeks from when it is pushed to updates-testing, regardless of whether or
not it has been tested, people may end up saying, "Why bother?"

We can always revisit this decision if users start having problems with 
the packages that Fedora Legacy releases.

	-David