Someone blogged about how he feels uncomfortable with some of the Fedora tools being released, since it appears to him they are not tested, and I quote:

"I'm sure that they are not tested, at least not enough, or not by normal people." - Davidson Paulo

The rest of the blog sounds like he's doing a number 2, and all he gets is a red face. I gotta admit he's right though. I never test enough, and I'm not a normal person. Anyway the real question remains: Are the tools developed by the Fedora team tested?

I think I can answer that, but first let me set the record straight:

1. I am the main Revisor developer (just so you know, remember that while reading the rest of this blog post),
2. I am the Revisor packager as well,
   
3. I'm with Fedora (duh, wearing the Ambassador Polo Shirt right now),
   
4. I love Fedora being, (and I quote) "a beta-testing distro by some developers/packagers". If that's how you see it, then that's what I love.
5. I'm not getting paid anything other then the gratitude of users like you </sarcasm>

That being said let's get back to the real question at hand: "Why this wasn't fixed before packaging Revisor? Were Revisor checked by its packager? Were Revisor tested by its developers?"

Why wasn't this fixed?

The current version of Revisor in Fedora 8 is 2.0.5-15.fc8. Use:

yumdownloader --source revisor

and download the Source RPM, or navigate to the Source Tree for this version.

Either way, you won't find $releasever, $arch or $basearch anywhere in the package other then commented out in sample kickstart files, and in the cfg.py where we so subtly replace all occurrences with the proper values, should they appear in 'repo' directives in the kickstart you supplied. So, Revisor ships with valid configuration files.

If anything, it's the packaging guidelines that prevent us from replacing old (possibly bad) configuration files in /etc/ with new ones. I know I had released Revisor once or twice with bad configuration files. You may have had Revisor installed previously, and have a couple of .rpmnew files in /etc/revisor/conf.d right now.

FWIW, I agree with the packaging guidelines in this aspect as well as the other aspects and I'm not going to change the location of the configuration files, nor am I going to bluntly replace existing configuration files with a newer copy as these files may hold customized configuration such as the inclusion of third party packages. I can only assume someone spent a little time crafting them.

Was Revisor checked by it's packager?

Since I am the packager, this one lands right in my lap. Yes, I do check things before I release them. Yes, things will slip through the cracks. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience it may have cost you, seriously.

Was Revisor tested by it's developers?

Since I am the developer, this one lands right in my lap also. Again, all I can say is that I test stuff. Again, yes, things will slip through the cracks. You can imagine there's some cracks in developing software in one's free, spare time. Between my 40-hour dayjob, my life, my family, my girlfriend and the occasional getting-drunk-friday-night, there's a couple of "not-seeing-$releasever-or-$basearch" moments and if I happen to be releasing Revisor at one of these oblivous moments, it ends up on your PC (and then later on your blog).

So, now that we've gotten the questions out of the way...

Would you mind logging a bug against the appropriate package? I'm too ignorant to Google the web in search of bugs reported in blogs or newsgroups or any other location then http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ You neglected to file one against Revisor.

Last but not least, another quote: "Software testing is not an obligation of end-users.", and again I can only say you are so right. It is not an obligation to you, me, or anyone else. Neither is using or developing software. I consider using or testing new software to be a chance, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Writing new software is a challenge. Getting bugs reported properly is a motivator. Reading blogs like yours is hilarious.