On 26. 04. 19 2:00, Christopher wrote:
On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 2:39 PM Tom Hughes tom@compton.nu wrote:
On 25/04/2019 19:29, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, 25 Apr 2019 at 04:23, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net mailto:nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net> wrote:
Le mercredi 24 avril 2019 à 16:14 -0400, Stephen Gallagher a écrit : > > FWIW, things should *not* be getting harder. Some folks just jumped > the gun and made changes they weren't supposed to (yet) and now the > Modularity team has a lot of fires to put out and very few resources > with which to do it. That’s not overly nice to the people that “jumped the gun”. They’re using modularity exactly as it was designed. Tragedy of the commons is an entirely predictible outcome, of something without a built-in sharing strategy.
That is my view of the matter also. There are a lot of packagers with way too many packages... and we have too many dependencies... so any tool which allows for that to be 'easier' is going to start an avalanche of packages getting moved out of the 'ursine commons'. As someone said yesterday to me, it is like showing that you can make a better living as a farmer using industrial farming techniques and then complaining that the small old-fashioned farmer no longer exists... or that a lot of people quit being farmers because those who used the industrial methods took over the market.
How does modularity make it easier though?
It seems to me that it does the exact opposite - instead of having one version of each package to maintain I now have multiple versions to worry about! I mean obviously I could convert to a module and only maintain one version but what would be the point? There would still be extra metadata relating to the module to maintain anyway.
I probably agree with you, based on my own experience alone. However, I think arguing against modularity is a distraction from the problem at hand. Can't we just concede that modularity benefits some, but not all, packagers? Fighting with the "Modularity team", whoever they are (a SIG? a mailing list?, a team at RedHat? ... I don't really know who they are) is only going to divide us and distract from the real issue. This isn't their fault. The packaging process is the responsibility of FESCo. It is their responsibility to ensure that the packaging processes in place are adequate to enable packagers to contribute, regardless of what's going on with any specific subset of packagers. But, it's clear that the current processes are breaking, getting more burdensome, and require more education, tooling, documentation, and general fine-tuning. As a result, many packagers are getting "left behind".
Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places, but I haven't seen much in terms of what FESCo is specifically doing to address this "left behind" issue within the packaging process. Is there a place where they regularly document what they are doing from a process engineering and oversight perspective, and receive community feedback on what they are doing? I think that could be helpful, but I don't know where to look (if it exists).
I am afraid there is no such dedicated place.
Recently, we've talked about the "contributing to Fedora is harder" at one of the FESCo meetings [1] and this is what we came up with Randy (bowlofeggs) after as 2 major issues:
https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2114 https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2115
However there might be more. I'd be very happy if you help me to identify major pain points that need to be addressed.
The problem at FESCo is that we cannot make people implement stuff or fix things. We can possibly only stop new stings from happening too fast.
I believe that several unfortunate choices were made in the past, but I realize it is to late to say: "scratch this, let's go back X releases". Instead we should try to "unbreak things" however nobody really knows how to do that :(
There was the packager UX initiative draft [2] proposed in December 2018, however it seems nobody really is eager to go and start doing this. It seems that this is a bit too much for volunteers and Red Hat paid Fedora contributors are already folly occupied by their primary responsibilities.
I'm glad you've opened this topic.
[1] https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2019-03-25/fesco.2019-03-... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives/Packager_Experience