On Fri, Sep 02, 2016 at 01:06:23PM +0200, Tomasz Nitecki wrote:
> On 02/09/16 12:07, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> > While the tools might actually work on the same data and do similar
> > things, the target audience is completely different for "how-can-i-help"
> > and "debian-qa-helper"[1].
> >
> > how-can-i-help shows a list of confirmed and likely opportunities to an
> > audience as large as possible, and if one random person takes care of a
> > specific opportunity that's a success.
> >
> > QA cleanup tasks should be carried out on a continuous basis by a small
> > and relatively stable group of people.
> >
> > If a newcomer wrongly believes that he can or should do anything with
> > an ITA bug displayed by how-can-i-help, then this will cause trouble.
>
> I can also understand that it might be confusing for newcomers that we
> are showing them ITAs or RFSs (as those aren't much useful for newcomers
> too). However, how-can-i-help users have varying levels of experience
> and use hcih in many different ways. I'd rather not break their flows by
> removing some opportunity types.
Opportunities for newcomers and opportunities for veteran DDs mostly
overlap, so it makes sense to have them combined in the same program.
> Still, I'd like to make hcih remain more of 'debian-qa-helper' for those
> who want it and more of 'good-starting-opportunities' for newcomers.
> Since we can already configure what is displayed to the user, I'd
> suggest that we add some default profiles ('newcomer', 'dd', 'qa') with
> appropriate opportunity types. The only question is how should a profile
> be chosen - during install? Or maybe we just throw some profile
> templates and put a notice in the manpage?
>
> By the way - web based QA tools show all packages. How-can-i-help limits
> those to packages that you use or you care about. Usually people are
> much more willing to help if they will be also helping themselves.
You miss the point that while this makes a lot of sense in many cases
(like maintaining a package you don't use is rarely a good idea),
there exists also a lot of work where this is a very bad idea.
What would you think about a release manager who would give
preferable treatment to the packages he uses?
Any kind of QA profile would definitely have to include --all - WNPP
maintainance tasks like the one you described regarding ITAs only make
sense when they they are done continuously on all packages.
95% of all O/RFA/ITA bugs are for fringe packages that are not on
your system.
Any regular maintainance on WNPP bugs must also cover these 95%,
and doing that only for the 5% of packages that are installed on
your system does not help much.
As an example, changing stale ITAs back to O/RFA is something that is
required.
But this has to be done:
- on a regular basis,
- on all packages and
- with a consistent policy
If someone would for example start changing ITAs for packages on his
system with no upload for a week back to O/RFA, I would use the word
"troublemaker" and not the word "contributor" for that person.
This kind of work very different from what how-can-i-help targets,
and they should be clearly separated.
There are some QA related tasks that match the target audience of
how-can-i-help, and for example how-can-i-help could start listing open
RC bugs in orphaned packages (O, not ITA or RFA). These match the target
audience of how-can-i-help pretty well.
> Regards,
> T.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
