RFC: "good-to-go" review checklist

[Daniel Reed <n at ml dot org>]

I would like to set up a formal checklist for good-to-go reviews, including
the old stand-by's like "executable should be stripped", and perhaps going
into some usability issues common to Cygwin apps or classes of Cygwin apps
(X apps, console, Win32 GUI, etc.).

I do not have an initial checklist to propose yet, so this is more of
general heads-up.

Eventually I would like all new good-to-go reviews to either dump the
checklist with a statement saying the package met all requirements, or
otherwise make it clear the reviewer kept the checklist in mind.

I would also like to code the list of steps/potential problems and have all
<problems> in apps.xml reference specific steps. If a reported problem does
not seem to easily classify as one of the checklist entries, I would
consider adding a new checklist entry on the fly.

For simple "problem" reviews, I would not require reviewers to list problems
by checklist ID. However, it might be easier to automate mail->PPL
extraction if some semi-standard syntax could be agreed upon to say "this
package has a problem because X".

In the PPL, I was thinking of listing the checklist entry description (and
perhaps common ways to fix the problem) in addition (or in place of?) the
free-form problem report that is currently listed. This could significantly
lengthen the PPL, though.

I would also like to modify cygwin-apps/package-maint/ to allow reviews to
be sent through that interface. The page could list the checklist steps as a
set of [X] boxes that can be checked off, perhaps with hyperlinks to
additional information about the problem/how it might be solved. This would
additionally allow package proposers to go through the checklist as a last
step before submitting a proposal.

Anything that can be checked automatically could either be performed using a
downloadable set of scripts [to be available from /package-maint/ and/or
/setup.html], or possibly a <form> upload on a Cygwin-running web server,
performed in real time.


In any event, I'm about half asleep and just wanted to get this sent. If
anyone [in addition to Igor, I'm sure] would like to work on this off-list,
at least until an initial checklist proposal can be drafted, feel free to
contact me privately. If you already have a checklist (beyond the "Making
Packages" section of http://cygwin.com/setup.html) and just want to send
that along, that's fine too.

Thanks,
-- 
Daniel Reed <n@ml.org>	http://naim-users.org/nmlorg/	http://naim.n.ml.org/
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