Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Nelson Marques]

No dia 26 de Abril de 2012 01:08, Stephen Gallagher
<sgallagh at redhat.com> escreveu:
> On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 22:43 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>>
>> Why not just drop the sponsorship process and just raise the barrier of
>> entry for the packaging process instead?
>>
>> Like having to have been a comaintainer for atleast one release cycle
>> then completed x many reviews in the next etc. ( essentally what you
>> propose there just without the "sponsor" ) and finally you are
>> maintaining your own package or if we drop that outdated ownership model
>> we have in place are free to roam "free" in the packaging community and
>> assist when ever, where ever possible...
>
> This approach completely disregards the very common example of "I'm an
> upstream maintainer of a cool project. I want to package and maintain it
> for Fedora." Under your approach, they'd first have to become involved
> in other projects before being allowed to add their package. This is
> unacceptable and would basically guarantee that no upstream would
> willingly involve itself with Fedora.

I was asked by a upstream to maintain a package for Fedora due to the
high demand it has from Fedora users, unfortunatly I backed down from
the proposal for several purposes:

 1) Someone claimed to own the package since 2009, but there's no
packages at all available on Fedora (weird huh ?); Upstream confirms
that they never got any information about this.
 2) For newcomers the review process takes way to long... Not long ago
a 3 year old request was approved... I have pending reviews for nearly
a year...

For this situation in particular, upstream is providing Fedora/RHEL
RPM's through a competitors service, openSUSE Build Service. This is
by far not elegant at all :)

The review process needs to be faster... And I go further... On my
dayjob we mirror a lot of stuff from EPEL which is mainly the only
repository we have trust with. We have people available to maintain
other packages on EPEL, and some of my colleagues are even part of
upstream in many cases (perl modules, java stuff, etc)... But we can't
contribute to EPEL for example with reviews that take countless time.
Currently we're preparing yet another public repository with our own
packaging and enhancements because reviews take a huge ammount of
time... Though this contributions would be mainly aimed to EPEL which
is what we use.

I find hard to become a packager for Fedora specially when there's
already background experience with another vendor.

NM