Upstream first? [Was: Re: The future of how to debug pages]

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 09/26/2012 08:37 AM, Jan Pazdziora wrote:
> The Fedora maintainers are supposed to bring the upstream to the
> distribution and maintain it there. The Fedora users are supposed
> to use the distribution, not compile the upstream themselves. It's
> the Fedora maintainer that should do the communication with the
> upstream (they have accounts in the upstream bug tracking systems).
> And it's the Fedora maintainers that should release erratas, fixing
> the distribution for users of said distribution.

( In a perfect pony world the Fedora maintainer should also provide the 
distribution with how to debug pages and how to test the component ( 
where relevant ) he maintained I even proposed to FESCO/FPC that it 
would be made mandotory before package would accepted in the 
distribution but they decided to make it optional instead and you see 
how well that has turned out )

I personally split maintainers in the distribution into three categories.

1. Packager

Individual that manage to put together a spec file ( it really is not as 
complex process as people let it out to be ) or find one the internet, 
clean the spec file up with the tools we provide for that, submit it for 
review and manage to get it into the distribution.

More often than not "Packagers" are not subscribed to the relevant 
upstream mailing list, do not have upstream account in the relevant 
upstream bug tracking instance for the component, basically are in 
little to non involvement with upstream whatsoever.

Packager also fail to understand ( or completely ignore ) the 
responsibility that comes with maintaining package in the distribution 
and completely vanish from the project after period of time either when 
they are being overwhelmed by the bugs they cant fix and the fear of the 
angry lynch mob of novice end user with torches that *expected* the 
application they install actually would work or simply the itch they are 
trying to scratch is gone, leaving the component they maintain in zombie 
mode in the project until someone else comes strolling along and adopts 
that zombie and the cycle repeats it self or releng spots that zombie 
and chops it's head of.

2, Maintainer

An maintainer is in good relationship with upstream, understands the 
responsibility that come with maintaining an component in the 
distribution and possesses the necessary skills to fix bugs and does so 
to the best of his or her abilities within the time he or her has to 
spare for such work.

3. Upstream maintainer

Same as 2 but *is* upstream.

( Of course there are exceptions to each of the three mentioned categories )

FPC/The development community seems to be targeting "packagers" either 
directly or indirectly by keeping the barrier of entry of maintainership 
and entry level for new application into the distribution as low as 
possible which in turn has increased the number of application we have 
available for our end user ( we are somewhere over the ca 12000+ 
component mark these days ) but at the same time decreased the overall 
quality of the distribution and forcing us and releng to come up with 
methods to counteract that ( which is usually shown in added bureaucracy 
and heavier policies and process ) which hurts both 2. and 3.

I Agree to what you mention there but in reality this is far from being 
the case in the distribution.

JBG