Is pkg quarterly really needed?

[Michael Gmelin]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:37:22 -0500
Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:

> I understand that having the quarterlies is not meeting your use case.
> You've said that.  We get it.
> 
> So you want some kind of running -quarterly branch.
> 
> But where are the N hours of work per week to QA all the patches to
> the -quarterly branch, or a -stable branch, or whatever people seem
> to demand, to come from?
> 
> This is a serious -- if very irritated -- request.
> 
> We've moved from a "we don't have enough person-power to manage a
> ports branch" to "we kinda have enough person-power to manage both
> head and a kinda-branch."  OK.  That isn't meeting all the use
> cases.  Understood.
> 
> Are you going to volunteer for a team to run that QA?  Who else do you
> think should be on it?  Clearly the current volunteers don't have the
> bandwidth.  It is hard enough just to kep ports-head building.  Where
> do the hours come from?
> 
> You're comparing your expectations of the output of what a
> professional QA team would do, to the work that N volunteers do.
> Obviously the results are not comparable.  It's crazy to think that
> they would be.
> 
> Honestly without some volunteers to do the _hard_, _unrewarding_, work
> to QA the ports tree, this is all either a) just talk, or b) people
> wanting volunteers to provide professional-level support, for free.
> 
> tl;dr: provide some resources, or don't.  I am getting to the point
> where I don't care either way.  All I see is the people who are doing
> actual work get poked in the eye.
> 

Answering one email in the thread to provide feedback on my experience.

After some time it took to adapt, I find quarterly to be extremely
useful to me, because

  a) as a maintainer, it provides a natural deadline when
     updates should be in the ports tree (as many users will use that
     for the next three months)
  b) it's the first time I'm actually using binaries from project
     servers on a few private hosts and vms
  c) as professional users, running our own poudriere builders,
     quarterly branches are useful as a baseline for our ports tree and
     patches to it. As many things in business are done on a quarterly
     basis, we simply create a new builder every quarter, build our
     package set, test the upgrades on staging machines and then change
     the repo URL on all productions servers and upgrade.

So, even though things might not be perfect, to me it's a great
improvement compared to the previous situation and I'm grateful to those
who put lots of effort into it.

-m

-- 
Michael Gmelin