Karanbir Singh wrote as to:
The strategy to release testable rpms to dev.centos.org
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, Rex Dieter wrote:
Instead of blocking on (lack-of) feedback, I'd suggest considering something like:
- Put pkgs in "testing"
- If no bugs reported after X days/weeks, move out of
testing
At least this way nothing gets perpetually stalled in testing.
Yikes. To torture the truism, 'An absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence' of problems.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is automatic promotion out of 'testing' into a chain _desireable_ in an enterprise oriented operating environment?
Clearly some so called 'admin's' will clearly implicitly trust anything (ie., look at the constant traffic into mailing lists for distributions where 'yum' is an available updater with horrific collections of random archives enabled). Why take the reputational risk here?
It may be proper for Red Hat's Fedora, as it has evolved (the firestorms I see regularly erupt on fedora-devel make me doubt this, but ... those participating there without an @redhat.com available to them are all volunteers), but not here. Putting aside stability or security issues, something as simple as added support load makes me want to avoid anything with an 'official' CentOS addon status. The 'Enemies of Carlotta' missed conflict thread I saw today reaffirms my doubt that auto-promotion works based on _assumed_ safety.
My solution, as to my archive of packagings, is simple -- Very general SRPM's exist, and a person who cannot solve a build environment and BuildRequires, (which is documented at my site, along with several other sites which I have contributed to over the years) is probably not going to use my packagings.
When I get a report, I address it. I do not undertake to warrant to any anonymous FTP user, any ongoing (nor even present) security, functionality, or other pedigree to the packagings. Indeed, I have marked certain unsafe ones as I have re-encountered them. This makes the maintenance load manageable.
I have worked on outlines thinking through some of the issues, on building a trustable, and 'vetted' submitted package infrastructure a couple of times. All of the plans fall apart on the relatively low reward for testing compared with the rather high and ongoing load of doing it 'right' and safely.
Before the divergence of cAos and CentOS we were discussing these matters: http://www.herrold.com/caos/QA-requirements.txt and earlier, before Red Hat's takeover of fedora.us, I had posted this into fedora.us's former mailing lists (the former mailing list host: videl.ics.hawaii.edu no longer responds) : http://www.owlriver.com/projects/packaging/fedora-flow.txt [That latter document provoked Warren for what I considered irrational reasons.]
In part CentOS works because it has limited itself to being a relatively strict rebuild effort.
-- Russ Herrold