Summary from yesterdays (mini) FESCo meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On 29 Dec 2006 15:13:45 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:

> So I'm confused; are you saying that you advocate a simple "APPROVED"
> with no explanation for reviews where you found no issues of note?

Yes.

> Well, firstly I have not advocated requiring reviewers to be pedantic
> (just the opposite, in fact), so I'll assume that you're replying to
> something other than the message which you quoted. 

Here is the quote again:

| I prefer a much simpler rule: please just tell us what you checked.

Plus:

| As the review is permanently kept as evidence, reviewers should not
| leave things open to question. 

> >> As the review is permanently kept as evidence, reviewers should not
> >> leave things open to question.  If you looked at something and
> >> found it OK, please indicate that instead of asking others to
> >> assume that you checked something and found it not worth commenting
> >> on.
> 
> MS> Why? Silent observers are irrelevant.  Only if an observer finds
> MS> something arguable and points it out, it gets interesting.
> 
> This is patently untrue, to the degree that I have to wonder if you
> are being disingenuous. 

Cannot follow you here. Where you do see disingenuousness?

> Do you not agree that prospective reviewers
> (i.e. the people who we desperately need once the current overworked
> crop of volunteers burn out) should have a volume of good reviews to
> learn from?

They learn best from submitting packages, from applying the guidelines to
their own packages, and from trying to review packages. This is what they
do once they maintain their package in CVS on their own without any peer
reviewing. They cannot learn from a brief list of YES/NO answers or
MUST/SHOULD items. Example:

 * compiles with $RPM_OPT_FLAGS: yes
 * unowned directory: %{_datadir}/blubb/bleep/
 * blubb-devel is missing "Requires: blip-devel blop-devel"
 * conflicts with "blop" and "blop-devel"
 * does ltdlopen *.la files
 * %{_libdir}/blubb/libbleep.so is not stripped

says nothing about how exactly I checked these. The techniques are
not explained during a review.