FreeBSD Ports conflicts checker

[Ion-Mihai Tetcu]

 [ PLEASE don't top-post, ktnx ]

On Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:29:58 +0300
Sulev-Madis Silber <madis555 at hot.ee> wrote:

> Well, I admit that this short summary was little too big. Bigger than
> the another report that regularly ends up in ports@
> 
> Maybe big maintainer groups need different approach to this. And this
> needs more refinement. I let things settle for a while and tell few
> weeks later what is left.
>
> With more sanity and size checks, maybe. Refined form of conflicts.
> This report already contains useful stuff but it's hard to spot
> currently.

Port "maintained" by ports@ are unmaintained so there's no "big
maintainer group" here; IMO you should send this kind of botmails to
ports@ from time to time (each 2-4 weeks), eventually with some by-hand
comments in it if that's the case.
Else no one will know / fix these ports.

Based on my experience of running QAT for some years:
- $people will complain about noise
- $people will complain about the way the mail is formatted (yeh, of
  course I have a few suggestion about that :D )
(in 90% of the cases, $people above would do much better to
ssh freefall.FreeBSD.org "tail -2 /etc/motd")
- bugging people / lists on each run makes people ignore the issues
My suggestion is to:
- do a "mass mailing" (recap) each 6-8 weeks,
- not send a mail on each run, except a commit was done to the
  respective ports since the lasts mail (in which case the problem
  should have been fixed)
- avoid false-positives even if this way you risk missing some
  problems; 5% of false positives make people doubt the real 95%
  problems (generally speaking, getting right the last 5-10% is 90% of
  the work)
- KEEP STATS. LOTS OF. if $port is broken for weeks and weeks, then
  we(portmgr@)'d like to know about it in order to find out what
  prevents it to be fixed and get it fixed.

From a QA POV, I think your work is one of the best things that
happened in the last years. THANK YOU for your work.

(I'll be in touch in the next days).


-- 
IOnut - Un^d^dregistered ;) FreeBSD "user"
  "Intellectual Property" is   nowhere near as valuable   as "Intellect"
FreeBSD committer -> itetcu at FreeBSD.org, PGP Key ID 057E9F8B493A297B