Release-critical bug process?

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 11:39 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  It just doesn't seem like the best way of organizing things - that way
> no-one really has ownership of the process, I suspect that it becomes
> something of a mess and there's lots of heat without light? It also
> sounds like it doesn't necessarily take on board much feedback from
> users. I honestly think it'd work better if a group - as I said, I think
> bugzappers is the best candidate - had ownership of the blocker bugs
> process. Of course, they should be very receptive to input from the SIGs
> and developers, and there would at a practical level be an ultimate
> override in the hands of the guys who actually do the releases.
> 
> Sorry if I'm way off base on this, just trying to provide a perspective.

What's been done so far as grown organically mostly due to 2 things.

1) We're huge.  Really huge.  Fantastically huge.  Waiting for all our
software to be perfect to do a release would mean we'd have releases
even less often than Debian.

2) Everybody has a pet bug, that they will consider mission critical.
That's just the nature of the game.

At the end of the day, there had and has to be a dictator, a BOFH,
somebody with the gumption and the authority to just flatly say "No".
Either "No, we're not going to ship without this being fixed." or "No,
we're not going to delay the release just to fix this issue."

For better or worse, that person has basically been me since I started
doing releng for Fedora.  I rarely if ever make any such decision
without consulting many parties first, but at the end of the day, I'm
responsible for seeing that Fedora gets out, and accountable that it
goes out in a usable manner.  I consult many people and try to inform
even more, but waiting for a vote of some sort from a (large?) body just
doesn't scale IMHO.

I'm all for adding more transparency to the process that evaluates the
potential blockers and makes the call on go/no-go per bug.  But that
process should be pretty light weight and capable of being done quite
quickly, particularly because "blocker or not" tends to be pretty
subjective depending on a lot of factors, that just might not be seen by
the BugZapper alone.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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