[Mageia-dev] Clearing up updates Management

Mon Jul 9 23:49:44 CEST 2012

During tonight's council meeting, people agreed the following things to 
+resolve the current situation with updates management.
+
+QA has had a difficult time since Mageia started, its main goal being to 
+improve the overall quality and image of the Mageia distribution.
+
+We all recognise that security updates are more important than other 
+fixes, but technically if another fix can be made at the same time, and 
+the packager agrees, then it should be done. An extra build on the 
+buildsystem + mirroring to the primary mirrors takes just a few hours so 
+it is not much of a delay.
+
+For optimum quality it is ideal to apply the fix in both stable and 
+cauldron. We have to recognise though that we won't always have 
+resources to fix everything, so we also have to accept that not all bugs 
+will be fixed on stable.
+
+Another difficulty for the QA team is that many packages are new to them 
+too, so it is a steep learning curve, which leads to many questions.
+
+QA has done a good job of trying to balance priorities. We have known 
+critical fixes to be pushed really quickly through QA when the update 
+request was thoroughly following the updates procedure, and/or the 
+packager asked for fast QA since he underlined the bug as being _really_ 
+critical
+
+Here is what was agreed upon at Council to help both packagers and QA 
+teams to work properly, in harmony, and improve the general process. The 
+QA team will ask anything needed on bugs they hit (remember end users 
+can/will hit the same things) even during security validation. These 
+questions should be hounored and responded to, either with a "will fix 
+now",  "will fix later" or "wont fix" type response, adding reasons in 
+case it can't be fixed right now.
+
+We all need to remember that every one of us is contributing of our own 
+free time, and no one person's  time is any more "important" than another's.
+
+This mail also means that we will have no more discussion on this topic 
+and should now close all pending discussions about all this. As a last 
+reminder, please keep in mind our code of conduct 
+(http://www.mageia.org/en/about/code-of-conduct/). Disagreements of this 
+nature should be raised at council and resolved amicably.
+
+To this end, this email has been written by council representatives from 
+both teams, following the council discussion, and is being sent to both 
+Packaging and QA team mailing lists. Let us all please abide by it and 
+move forward in a positive direction.
+
+Cheers and thanks
+
+-- 
+Anne
+http://mageia.org
+