Is a 16.04 alpha 2 needed?

[Walter Lapchynski]

Automated testing is a decent go/no-go but there's no way automated testing
can ever truly replace manual testing, which is generally more exploratory
in nature. We find all sorts of little problems this way. Automated
testing's great for the truly borked installs, but that's about it. I've
included ubuntu-quality so perhaps they can chime in on this one.

I'll also add that those images that have seen the most automated testing
are the ones that are core Canonical products. Those are the ones that have
paid employees working on them constantly. There is a high likelihood that
this is the reason why the quality going into automated testing is already
quite good. I can't say this is equally true for the various flavors.

As for the Release Task Signup, I'm not sure if it's even really truly
clear to all members of community what their new responsibility is. I was
around during the transition, but all of the current release managers were
not. I really don't feel like there's an adequate amount of advertising on
the part of the release team about this. Instead, there seems to be an
expectation that our volunteer release managers are somehow going to be
able to intuit the need to make this happen when they've got other
concerns.

It does seem that there are a core group of committed folks (myself, elfy,
flexiondotorg, and Riddell— some of which are no longer with us) have been
responsible for the community release tasks since the change was made. But
what about the others? There's Kylin, GNOME, Studio, Myth, etc. Maybe
trying to reach them directly might be a good idea.


On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 10:54 PM, Steve Langasek <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>
wrote:

> Hi Walter,
>
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 09:42:07PM -0800, Walter Lapchynski wrote:
> > I think it's worthwhile doing alphas, especially for an LTS version.
>
> Could you elaborate what value you see that you're getting out of these
> alphas, that couldn't be achieved more effectively by e.g. automated
> install
> testing against the daily images?  To me it looks very much like momentum:
> we've always done alphas so we should continue to do alphas.  Maybe I'm
> missing something, and if I am then let's by all means proceed with alpha 2
> and give the flavor teams what they need.  But I'd also like to challenge
> folks to think about whether this is still the case, or if there are other
> things we could be doing instead that would provide better value to the
> flavors for the time invested.
>
> > So Lubuntu would like to participate.  I'd certainly love not to have to
> > sign up for Release Tasks, but if I must…
>
> It doesn't seem like there's so much value to the flavors that people want
> to sign up for this in advance. ;)  Isn't this somewhat telling in itself?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
> Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
> Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
> slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
>



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Lubuntu Release Manager & Head of QA
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