Bug#332938: qa.debian.org: please provide a user/tester view with workflow progress status
Pierre Morin <adrpmym@yahoo.fr> writes:
> I agree with you. May be it is not accurate but that is why I ask about
> transparency : if Debian provided such a simple view of the workflow, I
> wouldn't ask my silly questions. And if Debian exported packages
> versions simply, sites like distrowatch could run accurately.
Well, Debian does try to export versions simply, but it's not possible in
all cases for other reasons. The watch file syntax does have a mechanism
to express transformations between the Debian version and the upstream
version, but not everyone uses watch files. I think a lot of your wishes
would be met if more Debian packagers used watch files where appropriate
and the sites that accumulated watch information were a bit more reliable.
> Suppose distrowatch (or other) offers distro comparisons ala
> wikimatrix.org or cmsmatrix.org. How would Debian look like ?
> May be Debian already provides that simple view (targeting
> testers/users) and I'm sorry not to have found it yet.
The use of "tester" here keeps confusing me a little, since I'm not sure I
see the direct relevance of version comparisons to testing, but it's
possible that you're using the term in a different way than I expect.
Note that Debian's release process means that it will lag behind most
other distributions except those with a similar support policy when doing
comparisons with the current stable release. Debian stable is comparable
to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release except even more stable. This is
considered by many of us to be a feature, not a bug, but it does mean that
if you want the latest and greatest, you need to run unstable or testing.
>> This site is really not particularly useful to people other than Debian
>> developers; too much of the information is technical or related to the
>> inner workings of the testing migration.
> Yes, ok, you are right, it is developer oriented. But as I follow a
> tester view or a user view (so a feature driven view) I care very much
> about what version is or will be available. In the QA screen I see
> "version n+1 has not yet entered testing but you can *check why*". I
> value this link very much : sometimes a deeper dependency or build
> explaination is nice to know. Hey, I'm wishing a less dev oriented view
> after all :)
Sure, I can understand that. I just wanted to express the caveats that
such notes usually only show up there at the very end of the process and
the wait is often for fairly technical reasons that even Debian Developers
sometimes need to have followed debian-release to understand.
>> No, it doesn't. It answers the question of whether the version in
>> unstable appears to be up to date, which is a completely different
>> question.
> Thank you for this good key, my mistake again.
I just wanted to say this because there may be a lot of reasons why a DD
isn't updating the package and the dehs site doesn't express any of that.
Usually that information is either not available at present or is only
available as a maintainer comment in a wishlist bug requesting a package
upgrade.
For example, a simple version comparison would say that Debian's version
of Apache is out of date, but Apache 2.2.0 breaks compatibility with all
existing Apache modules and therefore will almost certainly be packaged
under some other name (apache22, for instance), leaving the existing
Apache packages for the 2.0 release branch.
> I discovered the "ftp new queue". Would it help answering my "current
> packaging" question if the QA screen provided some information about the
> package in that queue the way it claims it has entered exp or unstable ?
I'm not sure how much help it would be, but I certainly wouldn't object to
that information showing up. It already does appear on the QA summary for
the maintainer.
> May be I should bug Debian marketing team rather than the QA with my non
> technical wish ;)
I can understand the desire and from a QA perspective, better tracking of
version comparisons between Debian and upstream is a useful thing to have.
So I don't object to the idea. :) It's just not at all easy to do
properly without providing misleading information.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: