On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 06:15:27PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 12:07:29AM +0100, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
I still believe that this concept is inherently incompatible with the idea of a cooperative community distribution, and that bringing it up again and again with minimally changed wording is not a constructive thing to do.
I can see why RHEL has a business case for having such "second-class citizen" packages, but this is not how Fedora works or should work.
Well, except, it clearly *does* work that way. We have many lightly-maintained packages in practice. I think it's better to label them as such and find positive ways to encourage the collaboration I think we all agree is best, rather than the current state where we basically just pretend that everything is maintained with high attention.
Let's stop using the word 'repo' for this idea. 'Label' is better but I'm not sure that explains things enough.
The objective I had was to identify things considered "lightly maintained" to expand collaboration. We have new package maintainers looking for packages to help with or we have multiple packages depending on the same lightly-maintained packages which presents an opportunity for maintainers to help each other out. The objective is to increase discoverability beyond the FTBFS reporting.
Example:
* A program is added by a new package maintainer that requires a library we do not have in Fedora. This package maintainer also adds a package for that library and is assigned as the maintainer. However, the program is the only thing using this library and the package maintainer focuses on maintaining the program and not necessarily the library package. We can cite policy, but the reality is that this does happen.
Maintaining a package as a BuildRequires is not always the same as maintaining the package for broad availability.
There is ongoing work we expect package maintainers to do and if we were able to categorize or otherwise easily identify these packages as open to gaining more co-maintainers, I think it would help the project as a whole.
I'm not suggesting we make a separate repo. A labeling or categorization capability that fits in to our existing tools I think would help a lot.
Thanks,