[Mageia-dev] Status report for Mageia 1 updates, and call for help from you packagers

Thu Aug 25 02:50:20 CEST 2011

Hi,
+
+I was told that QA Team's work's visibility needs to be improved, so as a team 
+member I'll try to give you some sort of status report.
+
+QA team currently mainly works on Mageia 1 updates testing and validation. We 
+managed to gather various volunteers, and while we probably need still more 
+volunteers, at least there's already a lot of work being done and updates are 
+being pushed.
+
+
+*** Updates pushed ***
+
+Since the updates media opened, 65 updates have been pushed (in terms of 
+packages, a lot more since an update can contain several packages).
+- June: 9, including nvidia drivers and system-config-printer
+- July: 46, including kernel, sun's java, iptables, flash-player-plugin, 
+kernel, logrotate...
+- August: 25 as of today, including KDE SC 4.6.5, libreoffice, flash-player-
+plugin
+
+The number of real bugfix or security updates is approximatively 3/5 of those, 
+because we also pushed new packages that were present in Mandriva 2010.2 but 
+absent from Mageia 1, as the policy permits (exception for Mageia 1):
+
+There is a mailing list where updates are announced, which is what I used to 
+count the updates for this report. 
+See https://ml.mageia.org/wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi/arc/updates-announce
+
+
+*** Pending updates ***
+
+Right now there are 16 pending update candidates (in fact 18, but I excluded 
+one that is not ready to be tested, and one which is in fact a backport 
+request waiting for the backports media to open). See 
+https://bugs.mageia.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=dorem&remaction=run&namedcmd=waiting%20for%20QA%20test&sharer_id=22
+
+5 are recent (assigned to QA for less than one week) and being taken care of
+
+The others are less recent (more than one week, sometimes even more than one 
+month) :
+- 7 are waiting for packager input, QA testing having uncovered bugs and/or 
+raised questions
+- 2 have been in need for testing for several weeks, here QA team must wake up 
+:)
+- 1 has been validated by QA one month ago, but was assigned to security team 
+following updates policy for security fixes, and got not answer. We have to 
+improve either the policy or the security team here (or both).
+- 1 is ready to go, we just have to tag it as such and pass it to the 
+sysadmins
+- the last one is firefox: this is probably the longer pending update (started 
+as firefox 5, now is firefox 6), and that with the higher visibility for users. 
+I would like to let dmorgan and those involved in its testing comment about it 
+: what caused such a long delay ? I'm not trying to blame anybody, especially 
+dmorgan who did most (it not all) of the hard work: I'm genuinely curious 
+about the causes of this delay so that we can explain it to our users, to 
+ourselves and above all learn from it.
+
+
+*** Short analysis (my opinion) ***
+
+Most updates passed to QA went fine, quite well tested. There's still a lot to 
+improve in the QA team's work, but right now we kind of manage to handle the 
+update candidates. Updates are probably not as thoroughly tested as we would 
+like to and often we have to trust that the bugs the upstream project claims 
+to have fixed are fixed. But we always try to check that there are no 
+regressions.
+
+What can delay an update is mostly:
+
+- bugs or other problems found during testing. An exchange starts between the 
+packager and the QA team and it can become very long. The above report shows 
+that currently there are more reports waiting for the packager's return than 
+waiting for QA feedback.
+
+- testers not knowing what to test, thus giving their time to other bug 
+reports. We can't know every package as well as the packagers know them. When 
+the packager provides good test cases, it can speed up the process 
+drastically.
+
+- lack of testers (not the majority for the current pending updates). It 
+happens mostly when we need testers with specific configurations or hardware.
+
+Here stops my own analysis, let the rest of the packagers and testers give 
+their views :)
+
+
+*** Need a broader view ***
+
+This report would be more complete with information about current and past 
+open bugs on Mageia 1 (and pending security issues), but this would go farther 
+than the purpose of this QA team report. 
+
+I'll let the triage team give us its report about pending bugs, and someone 
+(stewb ?) tell us about pending security issues.
+
+Best regards
+
+Samuel Verschelde
+ 
+