2016-02-03 17:04 GMT+01:00 Jonathan Wakely <jwakely(a)fedoraproject.org>:
On 03/02/16 08:44 -0700, Jerry James wrote:
> 1. Demotivating packagers
>
> I know a number of companies have experimented with "ownership-free"
> models of code development, but they are able to offer incentives that
> Fedora cannot offer, such as money and kudos offered in front of
> coworkers. What motivates volunteer packagers to do what they do?
> I'd like to hear from a few packagers on this topic.
I want Fedora to be better.
> If I send these two provenpackagers a somewhat hostile email, are you
> going to blame me? I have no problem with most provenpackager
> changes. In general, they have an obvious purpose and save me the
> work of making the same change myself. But changes like the ones
> above make more work for me, work that could have been avoided if the
> provenpackager in question had just bothered to make some attempt, any
> attempt, to contact me first.
I don't think that's always realistic to expect.
When a provenpackager is rebuilding *hundreds* of packages at once,
and trying to deal with maybe dozens of build failures, sending emails
to all the package owners and waiting to see if they respond promptly
is not an efficient way to get things fixed. Waiting for a reply adds
a lot of latency, and then you have to context-switch back to a
package you were dealing with a day or two ago. That's impractical
when you have a patch ready to go now and loads more packages to look
at.
I disagree with you on that point.
I agree with the premises that we can't expect provenpackagers to
contact every single maintainers for fixing a large number of packages
at once, but that's the role of fedora devel list.
If you can't contact everyone, a message on fedora-devel is good enough.
For instance, the desktop team maintains a spreadsheet before GNOME
rebuilds so that package maintainers can give their input before a
provenpackager do the builds.
That allows maintainer to provide valuable feedback like avoiding
borken versions upstream, or how to update patchset if they're
maintained in a specific way.
Sometimes a provenpackager will make a bad change, and that's
unfortunate, but it happens. Sometimes package owners make bad changes
too! :-)
Yes, but provided that they sent a heads-up on usual communication
channels, there's no problem with it.
If I make a bad change to a package please do let me know. If I
appear
to change things and walk away it's probably because I've moved on to
look at other packages that also need attention, not just a careless
hit & run. I would expect it's similar for others.
As a provenpackager, I always ping maintainers, and try to minimize
impact (e.g not fixing spec to my personal liking w/o agreement)
As a packager, I usually go through the changes, unless it broke
something or is non-trivial, I'm fine with letting it go.
<joke>If you add epoch to packages I co-maintain without telling me,
I'll hate you until the ends of time ;-)</joke>
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