Meeting summary/minutes for 2010-03-09 FESCo meeting

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 04:38:53PM +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Wednesday, 10 March 2010 at 16:22, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 13:08 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> > 
> > > Afaics this does not affect some minor issue, but a fundamental reason
> > > why package maintainer decided to become Fedora package maintainers.
> > > No volunteer package maintainer is in general forced to create updates
> > > and I am very sure that the volunteer package maintainers usually do not
> > > create updates that they do not want to use. So if you forbid package
> > > maintainers to package the version they want or need to use, being a
> > > fedora package maintainer becomes pretty useless for them.
> > 
> > I really think we want to have package maintainers whose motivation is a
> > bit stronger than 'I use this myself, so, meh, why not package it'.
> 
> Why is that not motivation enough? Why wouldn't we want to have this kind
> of people on board (assuming they follow the packaging guidelines and what
> not)? Packaging isn't rocket science.
> 
> In fact, my motivation for packaging lots of stuff was: "Hmm, my colleagues
> use this and they use Fedora so why not package it and save them the effort?"
> In return, I ask them to test new releases. Even if they don't have time to
> use bodhi, their feedback is still most valuable.
> 
The way I'd put this is: I think we need *some* packagers whose motivation
is more than "I use this myself, so if I package it other people can benefit
too" since there are some parts of building a distro and packaging that are
plan not fun.  But for a large percentage of the packages that we have that
is a perfectly sufficient reason.  So we need to make the large number of
packagers who maintain those large number of packages feel welcome and make
it as easy as is sane for them to package things for Fedora.

> As Tom wrote on FAB list, the real problem is making it easier for users
> to give feedback on updates. Only after we've solved that can we start
> thinking of imposing restrictions on package maintainers wrt updates.
> 
+1

> > At
> > least for packages that are part of the default install, I would expect
> > at least some awareness on the part of the packager that the work he is
> > doing needs to fit into the larger whole which is the released product.
> 
Note that this doesn't necessarily conflict with "I use this myself so I'll
package it for others to use as well"   All package maintainers are
weighing various options available to them when they make choices.  Someone
may choose to update a package because they consider the bugs the update fix
to be a high enough priority that it needs to go out to the release.  Others
may not update because they feel the risk of regression is too high.  But
both packagers can very well be considering the role their package is
playing in the larger distribution.

> Agreed. However, we should ask ourselves if it's better to have a package
> in our distribution even if it doesn't fit ideally with the rest or not
> to have it at all?
> 
> I prefer the latter. Someone might step up as co-maintainer and help.
> Starting from scratch is usually more difficult.
> 
Reading this whole paragraph, I think you meant former in the first
sentence.

-Toshio
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