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

[Luis Villa]

On 7/23/07, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 18:51 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > (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 :)
>
> Let me know how that works out. ;-)
>
> (Myself, I just combine - right now I'm making plum jam, cooking dinner
> for the family, cleaning the kitchen, making a blessed cup of coffee,
> and my mind is thinking and writing.)
>
> > 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
>
> On the face of it, it seems broken to require anything more than a plain
> ol' bugzilla account to file and comment on bugs, and close any you
> filed.  I insist on the need for the account so there is a way to
> contact a reporter - email address thereby being the sole requirement.

I want to do more than that; I want to help triage and organize bugs.
But apparently that requires a fedora account.

More generally, the wiki implies that any contribution (even bug
filing) requires a Fedora account.

> > 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.
>
> Is there a list like this on the Wiki?  Somewhere we can prioritize and
> account for shortfall.

I don't believe so. I'm not into creating pages on wikis when no one
seems to acknowledge

> > 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. :)
>
> Not to sure about that.  QA folks, for example, write content to
> Docs/Beats, and that becomes the release notes.

Optimize for the common case, not the edge case.

> What about email posting?  I may be crazy, but I like the idea that what
> I am writing here can be picked up by someone and written into Fedora
> Weekly News without worrying about redistribution rights.

That's quite distinct from bug work.

> I almost added bugzilla to the top category, and didn't for a couple of
> reasons.  One is the mixed-use bugzilla we have -- I'm not sure if one
> can give a general account that would have the permissions we want for
> Fedora bugs.  Cf. to anyone being able to file bugs against Red Hat
> products.  We can't force a click-through CLA for Fedora in front of
> someone who is filing bugs for Red Hat products.  So how to gather
> bugzilla into the click-through category like the Wiki?

Well, so...
(1) if that division can't be made in bugzilla, then you're right
there is a problem with not having the CLA for bugzilla permissions.
(2) if that is the case, you might as well give up on having an active
bug community. I'll go ahead and stop ranting about QA, since it is a
lost cause.

> Somewhere in here we might find it is more valuable to have a
> stand-alone Fedora bug tracking because of these kind of community
> issues.

Amen.

Luis