On 02/28/2013 10:06 PM, Robbie Williamson wrote:
On 02/28/2013 02:49 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
On 02/28/2013 05:09 PM, Martin Pitt wrote:
* Keep doing daily quality and keep improving our daily quality.
Big +1. I'm particularly looking forward to integrating our automatic
package tests with britney.
The QA work done in -proposed has increased the productivity for the
rest of us, no doubt about that.
But still, a word of caution here. Every piece of code even remotely
related to the hardware, not only the Linux kernel but also most of the
plumbing layer, is quite difficult (or even impossible) to automate
testing for. Even if we would set up robots in our lab looking at the
screen for artifacts, talking into the microphone and so on, we wouldn't
cover the world's hardware.
Hardware becomes increasingly complex, diverse, and so testing it takes
a lot of time. You can't go test thousands of machines to see if their
headphone outputs stopped working every single day.
Do we have a plan to deal with those types of bugs?
Maybe I'm missing something, but don't we have this problem *now*,
regardless of a rolling release or not? The only way to reasonably
solve this is get hardware OEMs to participate, who can't even tolerate
our 6 month cadence and thus do so on the LTS...which isn't changing.
I think you do have a point there, but let me answer from a different
perspective.
When I was new to Ubuntu, the intuitive thing to do to help out was to
download a beta release, test it, and report bugs. That's what betas are
for, right? Well, I learned that if I did that, the developers were
triaging my bug report around final freeze, and after that there was no
possibility to change anything. I then tried reporting bugs much
earlier, all I would get was a report back two months later, telling me
to test a new version of the package. After a few cycles, I had learned
that the right time to do testing was around feature freeze; when it's
still easy to upload, but the upstream versions have stopped pouring in.
As we now move to a rolling release schedule, when is the right time to
do a wide-scale testing and report bugs? Without just being met with a
"please check if it's fixed in the next version" message?
There is a difference between "daily quality" and "non-LTS release
quality", and a wide-scale hardware testing is one of those things that
make up the difference. This wide-scale hardware testing is not done by
hardware OEMs, but by the community, at least for the larger part.
And; that wide-scale testing in turn benefits the kernel/X packages we
backport into the LTS point releases.
That is not to say I'm against moving to a rolling release; from a poll
on a Swedish news site [1] most of our users seem to like it (73% for,
27% against), I'm just saying that this is a tricky problem we need to
solve somehow, if we can.
--
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
https://launchpad.net/~diwic
[1]
http://techworld.idg.se/2.2524/1.488083/darfor-kan-ubuntu-1404-bli-den-sista-pa-lang-tid
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