(re)introducing - fedora-review - tool to help with package reviews

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Hello fellow devs,

I am sure quite a few of you have done some reviews and thought "Hey,
a,b,c and d could be automated. For E I could use some more
information that can be automatically gathered". Some of you even
wrote your own tools to do some of these things.

Yet there is no unified tool, nor format for package reviews. There
are more reasons, but I guess biggest one is there are just too many
guidelines and there is probably no one who knows all of them. So few
of us got together and hopefully created something that can be used by
everyone.

fedora-review[1] is now in updates-testing. It provides several checks:
 66 generic tests (licensing, md5sum sources, bundling, etc.)
 9  c/c++ specific checks (static libs, ldconfig, headers, rpath etc.)
 13 java specific checks (javadoc, depmaps, jpackage-utils reqs)
 8  R specific checks

There are still many more checks waiting to be written. I'd like to
see Perl, Python and Ruby checks, though I am not *that* familiar with
their guidelines. I think the important thing here is that checks can
be written in basically any language. We have simple JSON api[2] using
stdin/stdout for communication. There is an example external plugin in
documentation in perl and shell (though that's just mock-check).

Our goal is for each language SIG (or other specific package group) to
maintain their own checks together with their guidelines.

* How you can help *
  - Tell us what checks are missing
  - Tell us if you think checks are doing it wrong
  - Create new checks (in language of your choice - we have JSON api)
      - do this even if the test cannot be automated. At least it will
        appear on the checklist for your packages!
  - Any ideas, bugreports etc will be much appreciated


[1] https://fedorahosted.org/FedoraReview
[2] https://fedorahosted.org/FedoraReview/browser/api/README

--
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky(a)redhat.com&gt;
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com