Testing team - how to deal with in Forum

Some changes:

What’s the testing team?

It’s a group of users who help make Qubes better.
They commit to testing updates and releases of Qubes OS, and are willing
to provide test results, confirm issues, and identify particular edge cases.
This is key to detecting issues early on, and stop them affecting more users.

What’s the risk?

For those willing to enable the testing repositories for the current release
the risk is minimal, because the packages will end up in current anyway.

If security is crucial to you, you should use the current stable release,
not enable the testing repositories, and not join the testing team.

How to join the testing team?

  1. Request to join the testing team
  • Via forum (preferred): request to join here (requires JavaScript and a forum account)
  • Via email: send an email to register-testing-team at forum.qubes-os.org saying you’d like to join (does not require JavaScript or a forum account)
  1. Follow the instructions for the kind of testing you want to help with (testing updates / releases)
Testing Type Instructions Description
Testing Updates see here Enabling the testing repositories (e.g. 4.0 testing)
Testing Releases part 1 & part 2 Running the upcoming Qubes version (e.g. 4.1) and enabling the testing repositories.
  1. Report issues in the appropriate category:
  • If testing updates, post in the ‘4.0 Testing’ category, or email 4.0-testing at forum.qubes-os.org .
  • if testing releases, post in the ‘4.1 Testing’ category, or email 4.1-testing at forum.qubes-os.org .

You can leave the group at any time by following steps similar to the ones in 1.

Packages move through the testing process quite quickly. Ideally you
would be able to update at least once a week.

When 4.1 moves toward release, we will see if we can test some of the
open issues in 4.0, and confirm they have been closed.

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@unman’s version above looks alright to me. Then I guess we’re ready to move forward, I think.

Ok. @deeplow, could you update your pinned post with the final version and make it public so that I can link to it from the email announcement?

Also, don’t we need to make the whole category public?

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Done. Link: Joining the Testing Team

Will do that now. I’ll ping you when I’m ready. And rename “User Support » Testing 4.1” to “User Support » 4.1” as explained before

Sounds good. To avoid potential problems, let’s proceed like this: You fully announce everything within the forum. Once you’re satisfied with how things stand, we can proceed to echo the announcement on the mailing lists.

The reason for this is that emails can’t be taken back after they’re sent, but things on the forum can be modified and edited. We may find that we want to tweak various things in the course of rolling this out on the forum, so it makes more sense to get everything situated on the forum before announcing via email rather than the opposite.

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I can set a “Custom template to display to users when sending a membership request”.

I was thinking of something like (feel free to suggest changes/corrections)

I have read the “about the testing team” post and would like to join it.

This could also be useful as an email template. Should we have anything else there?

I agree.

So, a user sends a membership request to join the testing team, and we show this message to them? I don’t understand. This is the sort of message that a user would send to us as a way of requesting to join the testing team. Also, how does email figure in here?

When sending the application this is the pre-typed text. It’s a template.

Oh, wait, after re-reading a few more times, I think I understand. A user wants to join the testing them. They hit some “join” button. This is the pre-filled message that they can modify before sending it to us. Makes more sense now.

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Now I need to set a group owner. Basically the person who’ll be approving people. @unman I feel you’ll be best fit for this job. I don’t know how this works via email, but my assumption is that you receive an email with the application message. And you reply for example “approved” and then we on the forum add that person manually.

I’ve added @adw as well and well as myself (myself mostly to keep an eye on process to see if its going well). And we can add more people as group owners in the future to reduce the “review burden”.

Sounds good?

Just updated the emails @adw. This is because in the future the upcoming releases will change and it would be annoying for all email users to change the address, I think. The new one are:

  • If testing updates , post in the ‘4.0 Testing’ category, or email testing-updates at forum.qubes-os.org .
  • if testing releases , post in the ‘4.1 Testing’ category, or email testing-releases at forum.qubes-os.org .

Gerat work.

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On the forum all seems to be setup now.

Signup Flow

I used my testing account (@deeplow-testing) to follow the signup process. (sorry @unman, this has images, but you should be able to follow with just the text)

  1. First the user goes to the group page (as indicated in the instructions) and then they click + Request

  2. After that they see the template I mentioned above and hit Submit Request

    tt-req

  3. Group owners get a notification / email with the application:

  4. Then the group owners click on the “handle membership request” link which takes us to a page where users can be accepted to the group:

This last step is the one that can’t be fully followed without running javascript. So we can handle it on the forum side for @unman. (you can also do a PUT request to https://forum.qubes-os.org/groups/44/handle_membership_request.json with the payload user_id=848&accept=true and the forum cookie – But this is not practical…)

Chose a category icon

Also, the beaker font-awesome icon seemed appropriate for the testing team. But I can change it.

beaker

But what about the risk related to stability mentioned by @adw? Shouldn’t it be mentioned?

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Perhaps we could add “stability” in the following statement?

If security and stability is crucial to you, you should use the current stable release,
not enable the testing repositories, and not join the testing team.

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I’ll wait until this is settled before proceeding with the email announcement.

Ok. Btw, you’re fine with the inclusion of “stability” in that statement, right? Since you proposed something similar. I’m guessing it’s non-controversial, but just wanted to check.

Other than that everything seems to be working find and ready.

Yes. If anything, I would say more (as I did above), but I have no objection to your proposed phrasing.

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This is good for me.

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Perfect.