I’d like to announce a new project of the QA team and an extension of the BlockerBugs App. The blocker and freeze exception proposals can now not only be discussed during regular blocker review meetings, but also at any time through discussion tickets hosted on Pagure. So even if you don’t have time to participate in the meeting, you can still participate and vote in those discussion tickets.

This will be mostly interesting to people who participated in blocker review meetings in the past, but we hope we can attract new participants this way. It is also very useful for package maintainers and developers, because they can now easily provide feedback regarding a proposed blocker or a freeze exception without attending a meeting at a particular time or diluting a technical discussion in Bugzilla.

To participate, open the BlockerBugs App for a particular milestone (e.g. F33 Beta) and you’ll see “Vote!” and “Discuss” links for proposed/accepted blockers and freeze exceptions. Follow the links to see tickets where you can express your opinion (which should ideally reflect our release criteria). You can vote according to the guide, please read it carefully. A bot is following each ticket, updating the voting summary, and accepting certain commands. Watching the Pagure repo also gives you the option to get notified about every new proposed blocker/freeze exception.

We’ve been using these discussions for a few weeks. So far our existing practice seems to be to vote for proposals throughout the week using these discussion tickets, close those which we can easily get enough votes and agree on, and discuss the remainder during the next blocker review meeting. The regular blocker review meeting hasn’t been replaced, but we use the discussion tickets to cut down on the meeting length. We’re still trying to figure out the best approach to take here, so nothing is set in stone. The voting functionality itself is also still in development, we’ll try to provide new features and improve the experience based on your feedback.