On 12/21/20 5:43 AM, Neal Gompa wrote: > distribution testing of packages as they're updated has been almost > entirely automated. Rather than spending ridiculous amounts of time > having*people* test it Thank you, Neal. Most of the technical conferences that I attend, year after year, include groups that stress the difficulty of improving anything due to the "That's the way we've always done it" barrier. I think that behind a lot of the fear of using CentOS Stream there's an implicit belief that the more time passes between a piece of software being built and an end-user deploying that software, the more reliable or trustworthy that software will be. I can't think of a mechanism by which that could possibly be true for pre-release packages. Letting packages sit, idle, until the next point release doesn't make them more reliable. (And Red Hatters have told us that there are virtually no beta testers doing any testing). On the other hand, it is theoretically possible that bugs will be found through real-world testing after release. At this point, I think it's all but explicit that some of the most vocal objectors view all software as a "beta" until someone else has used it for some period of time. For those people, the value of the point releases is that they believe they can reasonably expect to wait for an arbitrary period after a point release to let other users work out the bugs. Rather than testing software themselves, they're relying on the broader community to deploy software and report bugs. To be clear, though, there's no evidence that doing so is necessary or effective. If it were, we'd expect to see a flurry of fixes for bugs that were introduced BY the point release after each point release. There's a non-trivial amount of "that's the way we've always done it" in many of the arguments against moving to CentOS Stream. In my opinion, the more we do to push back against the idea that humans should be involved in the QA process itself, and the more we do to expand our trust in automated tests (which we also continue to expand and improve), the better we become as a community and an industry.