[Gllug] Red Hat versus other qualifications

[Joel Bernstein]

On 1 Jul 2009, at 15:56, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 03:03:51PM +0100, Joel Bernstein wrote:
>> As a customer I'd also want to know that the processes had been
>> improved to prevent a repeat, though.
>
> If you are a customer (I have no idea if you are or not) then you can
> ask about this through support, where they will be happy to explain
> the large amount of internal QA and package-to-package comparisons
> that we perform on everything before it goes out.  Also our ISO-
> compliant processes.

I don't understand this. The processes failed. No matter their  
buzzword compliance. Were they radically improved to prevent a single  
maintainer from buggering things up for everybody again? It seems an  
appalling, heinous lapse. Have I got this wrong?

> I don't know of any software engineering organization that has
> completely eliminated all bugs from every piece of software they
> release.  At least, not for a price that you or I are willing to pay.

You seem to ignore the fact that this was a problem _created_ by Red  
Hat. Admittedly, the Perl repo should be run in a manner whereby it  
builds after every commit, but RH's Perl maintainer ought to have  
known that it isn't always in a releasable state. Nobody else took  
such a cavalier "we lead and you follow" attitude with it. This isn't  
by any means a "developers shouldn't write buggy code" issue, it's one  
of poor maintenance - poor by the standards of a niche free distro,  
not a supposedly industry-standard expensive commercial one.

Richard, I appreciate your corrections where due and I understand you  
sticking up for your employers but seriously -- do you think this was  
a well-handled issue? Was it one that occurred through reasonable  
causes? Fundamentally, isn't it one that is likely to happen again if  
the processes didn't change? That's my issue here. I'd much rather / 
not/ have to tell my clients to build their own Perl or run my code on  
a different distro / OS.

Somewhere, deep down, it feels a bit wrong to couple dependencies for  
a fast-moving application with the system utilities' dependencies. So  
on a distro with lots of tools/commands/scripts in Perl, which have to  
keep working, I'd lean somewhat away from installing my own up to date  
dependencies on the system Perl. But that's more a matter of taste and  
cuts right across any distro-specific prejudice. Any thoughts on that?

/joel
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