[Mageia-dev] Clearing up updates Management

[Anne Nicolas]

During tonight's council meeting, people agreed the following things to 
resolve the current situation with updates management.

QA has had a difficult time since Mageia started, its main goal being to 
improve the overall quality and image of the Mageia distribution.

We all recognise that security updates are more important than other 
fixes, but technically if another fix can be made at the same time, and 
the packager agrees, then it should be done. An extra build on the 
buildsystem + mirroring to the primary mirrors takes just a few hours so 
it is not much of a delay.

For optimum quality it is ideal to apply the fix in both stable and 
cauldron. We have to recognise though that we won't always have 
resources to fix everything, so we also have to accept that not all bugs 
will be fixed on stable.

Another difficulty for the QA team is that many packages are new to them 
too, so it is a steep learning curve, which leads to many questions.

QA has done a good job of trying to balance priorities. We have known 
critical fixes to be pushed really quickly through QA when the update 
request was thoroughly following the updates procedure, and/or the 
packager asked for fast QA since he underlined the bug as being _really_ 
critical

Here is what was agreed upon at Council to help both packagers and QA 
teams to work properly, in harmony, and improve the general process. The 
QA team will ask anything needed on bugs they hit (remember end users 
can/will hit the same things) even during security validation. These 
questions should be hounored and responded to, either with a "will fix 
now",  "will fix later" or "wont fix" type response, adding reasons in 
case it can't be fixed right now.

We all need to remember that every one of us is contributing of our own 
free time, and no one person's  time is any more "important" than another's.

This mail also means that we will have no more discussion on this topic 
and should now close all pending discussions about all this. As a last 
reminder, please keep in mind our code of conduct 
(http://www.mageia.org/en/about/code-of-conduct/). Disagreements of this 
nature should be raised at council and resolved amicably.

To this end, this email has been written by council representatives from 
both teams, following the council discussion, and is being sent to both 
Packaging and QA team mailing lists. Let us all please abide by it and 
move forward in a positive direction.

Cheers and thanks

-- 
Anne
http://mageia.org