[Fedora-packaging] Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2015-09-11 at 19:32 +0000, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
> 
> On 09/11/2015 07:25 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > In a world where bundling was allowed, the package would likely
> > have
> > been approved on initial review; the only significant issues found
> > in
> > review were bundling-related. There are a couple of trivial issues
> > noted in #c7, but those would have been literally 10-second fixes.
> 
> Would have, could have, should have. . .
> 
> So let's play that game ;)
> 
> If all the related review request had been completed in timely
> fashion 
> he would have never given up on un-bundling it.
> 
> I'm not saying you are wrong but I'm not saying that you are
> entirely 
> correct in your assumption either what I'm saying is that there are 
> multiple factors at play here.

OK, so let's talk about review requests! Clearly, we have more review
requests than we can handle, hence there's a giant backlog, hence
general sadness.

How many of those review requests, do you think, are for tiny bundled
libraries that will probably only ever be used by at most two packages
(probably only one)? Wouldn't we have much less of a backlog if we
didn't have to do all those unbundling requests? ;)

Again, I don't actually think the answer here is "screw it, let's
bundle everything" - but I do believe it's reasonable to say that the
strict no-bundling policy is causing a lot of fairly pointless work
(I'm really not sure unbundling tiny crappy PHP 'libraries' that have
no sane upstream maintenance policy in any case has ever actually
benefitted anyone, anywhere, very much), and there are definitely
cases where it is a primary cause of people abandoning review requests
or simply not bothering to submit them because the required unbundling
would be way too much work to be worthwhile. There is a *genuine non-
zero cost* to the unbundling policy, which is all the OP was
suggesting.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net