Re: [gentoo-dev] QA is unimportant?

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On Monday 09 November 2009 13:08:52 Peter Volkov wrote:
[Snip]
> Well, it looks like the root of this problem is the following statement:
> "QA is less important then new packages in the tree". I failed to hear
> any arguments why QA is unimportant so I still believe that QA problem
> is a problem.
> 
Ok, here's the real problem;

"Unmaintained stuff is unmaintained"

And instead of being happy that people like ssuominen just fix things where 
other people don't (be it because these other people have no interest, only 
care about a few packages or have become distracted with life) some people get 
really confused and start working on demotivating us.

You should understand one thing: I don't care at all about most packages. I'm 
handling virtualbox because right now jokey doesn't seem to have the time. I 
fixed Xen bugs because drobbins pointed out that there were a few bugs with 
it, and the current maintainers seem to have gone for a long walk in the park. 
Can't blame anyone there (I've disappeared for some time too), but those 
packages would be in a really useless state now. 
And if I break something for a day or two, well, that's ~arch for you. I try 
to avoid breaking things, but if things break in ~arch the users shouldn't be 
too surprised. Otherwise we wouldn't even have to care about having the 
arch/~arch split. Better a slightly buggy version than a security-exploitable 
version. Especially when the bug gets fixed the next day.

So find me a dozen recruits that can properly maintain things and I won't feel 
the need to touch random packages. Stop living in your sandbox and have a look 
at the bigger picture :)
(Btw, I wonder how many bugs glibc-2.11 will bring. We'll just let users 
discover them. I love that QA!)
I'm trying to get people to help me, but it's a slow tedious process to even 
motivate most. And then our recruiting puts up a virtual wall many don't want 
to climb over. At times it's tiring, it's demotivating, and still we go on. 
Because we still believe that we can improve things. And as they say, you 
can't make an omlette without breaking some eggs.

Take care,

Patrick