It's a common complaint that it's too difficult to get updates to critpath packages through the update system at the moment. We've been looking into trying to make that easier without just dropping the critpath requirements, and one thing we looked at was whether the requirement for positive karma from proventesters was a net benefit.
Thankfully this is the kind of thing that we can actually generate numbers for. Luke pulled some statistics which are available at http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/104084.html . The relevant section here is the set of packages that have (a) sufficient positive karma to be pushed, but (b) negative proventester karma - that is, the packages where negative proventester karma prevented a push. Straight off, we can see that these amount to 1-2% of all critpath updates. It's simply not common for proventester to make a difference to the outcome. If we look at the individual packages, things get even more interesting. Many of the updates receive a mixture of proventester karma, so even with the negative the push would still go ahead. As far as I can tell: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/xorg-x11-drv-geode-2.11.9-1.fc14 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/system-setup-keyboard-0.8.6-2.fc14 are the only two updates where the proventester karma requirement would have made a difference, out of 1942 critpath updates that made it to stable. That doesn't seem like a great hit rate. So, assuming I'm not grossly misanalysing the data, it seems that we could drop the proventester requirement from critical path updates with a negligable change in the quality of the updates. Thoughts? -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
