Good Morning Everyone,
This topic has already been discussed a few times over the past month, but Adam
Saleh, Nils Philippsen and myself have had the opportunity to invest some time
on it with the hope of making the packager's life simpler as well as making it
easier to build automation around our package maintenance.
Going through the various discussions, I think we are running into a classic sausage factory problem.. everyone wants to have their favourite meat, but the only way to make it work is mix them all together, grind it up and come up with something else.
Would it make sense to classify packages into 3 different groupings (like cheese)?
Processed cheese: packages which are automatically built with a processed tool that updates most of the items. Just gets a bit of work every now and then from a packager afterwords for major changes or side-cases found. Everything in the package is fully automated with build tools filling in all the needed data for it.
Cheddar cheese: packages which need more work and care, but are still pretty 'standard'... some may be sharper and need some aging but might be ok with some automated parts (%changelog and %release and a couple of things).
Beaufort D'Ete (etc etc): packages which need a lot of work on the side of the maintainer to make it work for multiple reasons. Each packager has their own way of dealing with these packages which makes each a regional cheese.
Currently a lot of packagers have to spend their time making cheeze-wiz packages so that they can even get to working on their specialist cheese. But because they are focused on wanting to get that specialist package out they are worried that any change will make all packages cheeze-wiz.
I am wondering if we just make that part of the system separate with people knowing that they can label a package into a specific mental bucket, they can focus their energies on their Comté vieux.