Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 12:18 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:

> 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.

This seems like a specific case of weirdness and nothing worth drawing
general conclusions from. Why not just describe the specific situation
here and see if it can be resolved instead of phrasing it as if it were
a single example of a general problem?

>  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...

This can vary hugely; it depends to a large extent on a) how interested
other people are in your package and b) how hard you try and get someone
to review it.

For instance, the review for Cinnamon was picked up within days of being
filed, because of widespread general interest. (It's been held up by
technical issues, but it was picked up quickly and followed actively).
If your package is 'plugin for obscure scientific framework that three
people in the entire world care about', you can expect the review to
take longer, especially if you make no active efforts to try and find
someone to review it - by mailing the list, offering review swaps,
poking people you know within Fedora, pulling in favours etc. If you
just file a review for anything but a very popular package and leave it
sitting there, you're relying on one of the few people who consider
'going through the pile of packages for review methodically' to be a
good time.

> 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 :)

OBS now stands for Open Build Service, specifically because SUSE think
it should be a generic service. Obviously it's not as good as being part
of the distro, but from all I know about it, it seems like a perfectly
good second choice. Isn't calling it 'a competitor's service' and
implying it would somehow be better if there were some Fedora-affiliated
remote build service and the package used that instead simply an example
of NIH thinking? If OBS does the job, why should Fedora spend resources
creating a 'competing' service?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net