> The only way it reduces the risk of releasing a botched update
is
> the
> the updates somehow get more testing just by staying in the testing
> channel longer.
...and actual QA, from the professionals and volunteers on the QA team,
who are very good at finding bugs pre-release but currently do zero QA
on our updates because it's an unmanageable rolling stream of a
bazillion separate updates. With batched updates, you can test a batch
with the same overall criteria used for releases to see if it's
botched. That's the advantage of batching over simply extending the
amount of time spent in updates-testing.
I've not seen that proposed anywhere, I'm not sure QA has the
resources to actually do that.
> Which makes the question whether botched updates happen because
not
> enough people use testing, or because there are enough people using
> it
> but they don't have enough time to spot the problems before the
> updates
> get pushed.
We indeed do not need batched updates to extend the length of time
updates remain in testing. We could (and should) do that immediately.
At the moment the time is a week, basically I don't see any real
proposal to extend that overall, just to batch updates out on a Monday
(not sure that is the best day if no one tests over a weekend). Most
of the updates that go out quicker than a week are due to receiving
the explicitly requested amount of karma.