Law Students

a rumbling about X QA

By Luis

As I rebooted this morning as a result of RH bug 473347¹ two serious questions popped into my head:

1. do any of the major core X contributors² employ a full-time X QA person? As far as I know the answer is ‘no’ but I’d love to be wrong.
2. would a full-time X QA person funded fractionally by the major X contributors, reporting to the development managers for each of those contributors, but formally employed by freedesktop.org, make even more sense?

My sense is that this kind of position that may be hard for any one contributor to justify but that it is the kind of thing that is probably necessary for a complex piece of software to succeed, so a position with costs shared across the various contributors might make sense.

(This is only partially inspired by Owen’s recent call on behalf of Friends of GNOME and the sysadmin team, but I’ve always thought a full-time GNOME QA manager would make sense- it really is vastly more efficient for everyone involved if much of this sort of stuff is done upstream. And it just struck me today that probably the same is true for X.)

1. this was today’s first reboot, but recent experience suggests I’ll reboot at least one more time and probably at least twice more today
2. RH, Intel, Novell, as far as I know?

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).