rawhide and Fedora QA [was Re: why I'm using Ubuntu instead of Fedora ATM]

[Luis Villa]

(Apologies for the lag, life has been a little crazy of late; I've
been trying to escape from the computer when not actually needing to
be in front of it :)

On 7/6/07, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-07-01 at 16:19 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
>
> > on the plus side:
> > * it is now rawhide everywhere, so people can find information about it. Yay!
> >
> > on the negative side:
> > * AFAICT, still no information about why people should actually use
> > rawhide, or how they might use it. So the naming work is for naught.
> >
> > on the very negative side:
> > * I tried to edit a bug today to make it more useful by correcting the
> > out of date information in it. I'm now told that to make the bug more
> > useful, I have to create a gpg key and sign the CLA.
>
> This was all on the Wiki?  Because there aren't any such requirements on
> bugzilla.redhat.com.

I was told in IRC that my Fedora account (non-bugzilla) needed a
particular group, which appeared to be confirmed by:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/#head-69a2fdca9900f61c9b53d353b2bc5b09d58fdf70

At that point I decided I'd make a bigger impact discussing the
problem here than ignoring the problem, registering, and fixing only
the one bug.

> > Needless to say, the bug is still useless and will remain that way for
> > the foreseeable future.
> >
> > Generally, I'm just shocked that Fedora seems to attach so little
> > significance to an area where we should be kicking the crap out of
> > proprietary operating systems, and where volunteers should be making
> > it substantially more cost-effective to produce software.
>
> Sorry, which is the area with little significance attached?

QA, really. The CLA is just one symptom of that; the lack of
information about rawhide; the poor treatment of updates-testing users
(things broken for many days, which discourages people from using
updates-testing at all); the lack of usable definitions for
severity/priority all jump out.

> We have an ongoing problem with barriers to entry for Fedora.  Legacy
> stuff + legal bits + lack of resources to fix stuff (compared to other
> perceived priorities).  As a tie-guy-to-be, I thought you'd understand
> the murky waters around e.g. the CLA ... why it has to be, why it's hard
> to find good ways to sign it, etc.

I really mostly wasn't thinking about the CLA at all, except inasmuch
as I can't see any sane way why it should be required for QA work,
since nothing I do in QA can possibly be copyrightable. But yes, in my
copious spare time I'm trying to figure out how the CLA can be
simplified and applied to fewer things. :)

> Fortunately, we do have this that I worked out with Mark Webbink:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KarstenWade/Drafts/CLAAcceptanceHierarchies
>
> Bottom line -- GPG signing required for work that goes directly into a
> package we ship.  So, going onto the Wiki can be done with a
> click-through CLA.  Which is why we are waiting for the next Moin
> release to implement ... any day now ...

Hrm. Mind if I talk to Mark about slotting Bugzilla into that
somewhere? (ideally 'none', but perhaps in the wiki level.)

Luis