[Angstrom-devel] Maintenance of unstable feed

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello Rod,

Sunday, January 6, 2008, 11:31:14 AM, you wrote:

> Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
>>   That's what we're looking for for Angstrom too, asymptotically.
>> Except that you don't say here how you solve problem of testing,
>> especially, community testing (and that's 80-90% of the entire
>> testing an OpenSource project can afford).
>> 
>>   But later, you say...
>> 
>>> Yes, our policy for slugos-packages is that if it compiles then it can
>>> be enabled for the feed.  Since the autobuilder works directly from the
>>> latest OE head, then our developers have direct control over what the
>>> autobuilder builds, with no middle-man involved.
>> 
>> ...that you don't have any testing at all, except for purely formal
>> buildability one!

> As Linus Torvalds says: "Testing is for users".

> The person who adds the package to <distro>-packages.bb usually actually
> tests that it runs, but even if they don't then it's not a problem - if
> a user reports a problem with a new package, then putting it in the feed
> has served a useful purpose (i.e. it's either fixed, or it's marked as
> having a deficiency, or it's removed as being unfixable).

> And BTW, the people who added the package to OE in the first place have
> usually tested it as well.

> I say package feeds should be like open source code - release early and
> release often, and let the users find the bugs.

  Well, then we have full agreement on how testing should work, except that
I try to make sure it applies [at least] to unstable feed. As
for release feeds, I personally don't think such this would be a good
thing, even skipping the fact that they do not have different
procedure as of now. Again, it's one thing to add 1 broken package to
NSLU2's hundreds of existing well-tested packages, and another matter -
to add 70 broken packages to current Angstrom few dozens ;-).

  In this respect, Angstrom seems to more follow Debian stable vs
Debian unstable model, except that we only start and hopefully won't
pickup "Debian stable" anecdote ;-). (Disclaimer: I have to admit that
I don't know details of Debian's technical governance rules, for
example, I don't know who or what is allowed to upload to release vs
unstable repos).

> -- Rod

[]

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                            mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com