Announcing the release of Fedora 15 Beta!!

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> Will you resurrect the packages when their package maintainer retires
> them after F-15 gold despite of you having fixed them to build?

Retiring the packages is evil in the first place, and IMHO we're making it 
way too easy. Packages should only get retired if they are replaced by 
something different with equivalent or superior functionality or if they 
really cannot be made to work at all (e.g. because they depend on an online 
service that went away). The mere lack of an active maintainer shouldn't be 
a reason to retire a package.

> Do you take over packages where it is discovered that they are
> unmaintained in Fedora for a long time?

Depends on the package. But see above, I don't think being unmaintained 
should be a reason for dropping the package, as long as it works.

> Will you respond to incoming problem reports that would be assigned
> to orphan-owner only?

No (unless I'm picking the package up), that's the whole point. Making 
packages work on an as-is basis doesn't require signing up to handle any and 
all issues reported against them.

>> We should work together as a community
> 
> We do, we do!  Still we want to have at least one dedicated person take
> care of a package including bug reports. We want to distribute the load
> and scale, not create a growing pile we cannot handle. I've used the
> provenpackagers powers before, too, but still I'd like to _work together_
> with other people, and as a requirement I'd like to see that the other
> people as busy with other packagers or at least are still around instead
> of having left the Fedora Project silently.

An effective way to distribute the load is to form a SIG of provenpackagers 
stepping in to fix broken dependencies, FTBFS issues etc. This has been 
proposed a few times, I'd still be willing to sign up! The point is to 
DISTRIBUTE the load instead of relying on a single point of failure (the 
maintainer of the package).

> Nobody, not nobody else. The problem is when "nobody" seems to be
> responsible, not even the guys who are on the list of a package's
> maintainers.
> 
> I think what you call responsibility is something different. If you have a
> spare hour, you'd like to jump in and touch arbitrary packages in
> arbitrary ways. Not limited to Rawhide. You don't take responsibility for
> the package in bugzilla. Not for existing tickets and not for future ones
> either. And you don't care to find out why "nobody" has applied a fix
> faster than you.

Well, yes. I cannot sign up to maintain 1000 packages (this just doesn't 
scale), but I can step in and make them build again when they're broken. 
(I've done it several times in the past.) And as I said elsewhere in this 
thread, it's better to have a package available as is than to not have it at 
all!

> It's not even likely that you will be available next time the same package
> needs another fix or rebuild, if its maintainer is still absent.

That's exactly why I shouldn't be the only one doing this work! I haven't 
been able to do broken dep fixing for a while and it shows. The situation in 
F15 is also particularly bad! Usually, at this stage of the release cycle, 
there was just a dozen packages or so that needed fixing and I could just 
fix them all in a couple days. This time, it's a big mess. We really need a 
SIG taking care of broken dependencies globally, and we also need to 
encourage the people who broke the dependencies (e.g. by bumping the soname 
of some library) to take care of fixing the fallout.

Our freeze strategy is also not helping fixing this, e.g. all the fixes had 
to go through Bodhi even between Alpha and Beta; in the past, the tree was 
self-populating until the Beta (or Preview, as it used to be called) freeze. 
This causes extra work when trying to fix the breakage.

> If there is nobody left to maintain a package, you cannot work together
> with anyone. It would be a one-man show. How many packages do you really
> feel responsible for? Does that include packages you don't even use?

The idea is that it shouldn't be just me doing this, there should be a SIG 
for this.

By the way, I'm not the only one who used to fix broken dependencies every 
so often. Alex Lancaster often fixed a lot of them, as did some other 
people. But instead of encouraging such fixing and having an organized SIG 
formed for it, we get told not to do it. Do you really think this is in the 
best interest of our users?

> Don't generalize. I refer to the scenario where weeks or months pass
> without a package "owner" doing basic package maintenance and without
> asking for help. There are various examples, and I've looked up one
> for you:
> 
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/460557

I think you, or any provenpackager really, should just fix those obvious 
issues. I might even do it myself, even though I don't use this package at 
all.

>> I think it is of value to Fedora to ship as much (useful and properly
>> licensed) software as possible.
> 
> _Working_ software. With the Fedora Packager handling incoming problem
> reports, because the problems may be specific to Fedora.

The software usually works. If it really doesn't, we need to get somebody 
(whoever) to fix it, even if it's a fire-and-forget fix. The important thing 
is that the package is working. How it gets working is not so important.

>> That software is clearly useful to somebody
>> or it wouldn't have been packaged in the first place.
> 
> "Somebody" could be just the package submitter. And if that person isn't
> active anymore (sometimes without prior announcement), who else is left?

If really nobody uses the package, why do we care if it's broken?

        Kevin Kofler