On 05/11/2010 05:26 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote: > On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Chen Lei<supercyper1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> It seems a lot of trivial packages in fedora are unmaintained for a long > > I dispute your claim that there are "a lot." > > Yes we are going to have things fall through the cracks. But I've > seen no analysis and no tools which would help us identify things > which are in an unmaintained state for long periods of time..for some > consensus definition of "unmaintained". Until we have that analysis > we can't know if we are talking about 10% or 1% or 0.01% of our > packages. I think the root of the problem is the lack of automated testing rig, in the sense of, for example, VTK's nightly build dashboard: http://www.cdash.org/CDash/index.php?project=PublicDashboard We are doing test builds, but we don't have infrastructure to do automatic application level testing, even for simple things like starting the application, making sure the window or prompt appears and checking that a basic command returns an expected result. I keep stumbling into Fedora packages that simply don't run. Of course they tend to be not very important, lightly used packages, and the percentage is probably minuscule, but it's a good example of how people might become annoyed and make claims like Chen Lei's. A couple of examples that I reported (one fixed, one to go) - BLT extension to TCL failed its own tests https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=486165 - drpython fails to run at all https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=591213 To protect Fedora's reputation this issue needs to be dealt with. We are far away from crisis of course, but leaving things on autopilot leads to situations like the WUSTL collection in the 80's with thousands of Basic programs in various states of disrepair. This probably means at least a rudimentary application testing rig and a discipline that identifies and deals with distressed packages. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
