[Mageia-dev] please stop doing "bugs" for updating magia 1

[Michael Scherer]

Le mercredi 11 janvier 2012 à 11:24 -0500, Juan Luis Baptiste a écrit :
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:43 AM, Florian Hubold <doktor5000 at arcor.de> wrote:
> > Well, 2) and 3) are not valid reasons here, because backports should get
> > a similar amount of QA testing as normal update candidates, and for
> > the updates policy require a bugreport for validation through QA.
> 
> I think this is unrealistic in practice. For updates, QA will be
> testing one bug fix,  with a backport you will have dozens or more new
> features to test, you can't expect for QA to test all of them to be
> able to give the OK, more if they even don't use the backported app in
> a daily basis. Testing of a backport has to be more relaxed and
> compromise to test some basic stuff like that it installs and starts
> correctly, maybe the package maintainer can give some hints on what
> else to test, but the rest we will have to trust in the maintainer's
> judgement.
 
So trusting and having bugs are totally unrelated. And if you doubt that
bugs appear, just see our bugzilla.
We trust upstream ( most of them ), and yet there is bugs.

> If you think that all version backports should be tested in the same
> way as updates by QA, then all versions upgrades in cauldron should be
> tested by QA before pushing them to the BS right ? 

No, they should be tested before being put in the stable release. And
that's exactly what we do by freezing and testing before release.

> why risk for a bug
> on a program when updating to a new mga version and not when doing a
> backport ?, it's exactly the same situation.

That was already extensively discussed in the past, but if we do the
same stuff than in Mandriva, we will end with the same result than in
Mandriva.
- people don't test backports, because that's not mandatory 
=> some bugs slips.

then users start to say "do not use backport if you do not know what you
do or if you are not expert, because I had $problem once". With time,
such advice start to impermeate the community, and people start to
simply not use backports.

Worst, some people just do cherry picking of backports, and take one or
two or them, and this result in wierd bugs with 2 effects :
- we lose time
- user think we are doing a bad quality distribution, because he has a
mix that he is the only one in the world to have. Non technical users
tell him he should not mix ( and they are right ), and so he start to
feel bad because we gave him something that do not ork. Some users also
end with system unsupported, so no security update, nor bugfixes.

In the end, users complain that distribution is broken, and that impact
our image. We cannot tell "do not mix", because we cannot tell them to
update backports without fear, as that would be lying. And in the end,
saying "this is not supported, but we offer to you" is just sending a
confusing message.

If we start to give low quality stuff as Mageia, people will just think
Mageia is low quality.

-- 
Michael Scherer