Re: Testing Query
On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 12:47:33PM -0000, Richard Gibson wrote:
> I know that you do a lot of testing for Debian, and as a tester of software
> applications for my job, I was curious as to how you go about testing
> various different pieces of software. What strategy do you use, and what
> systems do you use for feeding back problems? Do you have regular
> meetings/discussions with developers, and how do you make sure that once a
> message is sent regarding a bug, that it is fixed? Is there a set time scale
> for fixing of bugs?
Actually, we at owner@bugs have very little to do with testing; we just
keep the bug tracking system running smoothly. Testing is down to
individual developers and the QA group (debian-qa@lists.debian.org),
although there really is no formal test framework. I can answer some of
your questions, though:
* Complex packages such as gcc and glibc have their own test suite,
run during their build process. It's up to the maintainer to decide
what to do with the results.
* The system that builds the "testing" distribution (the rolling
release candidate) ensures that packages can't enter it until their
dependencies are consistent (http://www.debian.org/devel/testing).
* No, we have no regular meetings or discussions with developers.
Debian is an organization of volunteers, so depending on what you
mean by "we" there may not in fact be a "we" to have the meeting. :)
Developers talk to each other routinely using various means of
communication, of course, both socially and on technical matters.
* There is no set time scale for bug fixing. More serious bugs will
attract attention and somebody will most likely eventually just fix
them if the normal maintainer isn't available.
Most of our development processes are described in links from
http://www.debian.org/devel/, the Developers' Corner on our web site.
> And is there a site in the UK that allows me to download Debian over
> FTP/HTTP (preferrably HTTP) without bandwidth throttling?
ftp.uk.debian.org is our canonical UK mirror. I don't think it's
throttled, but could be wrong.
> ps. If this doesn't concern your department, could you send it on to the
> appropriate department... thanks!
You probably want to contact debian-user@lists.debian.org for user-level
questions about the distribution (if you want to be cc'ed on replies,
say so) and debian-qa@lists.debian.org for discussion about quality
assurance. I've copied the latter mailing list here.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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