On Wed, 2 Jan 2008 06:23:22 -0800, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:48:21PM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
On Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:46:35 -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
OK ... people can argue about this until we are all blue in the face.
The real answer, however is what your customers want.
Fedora is not a product that is sold to customers, so by definition there are no Fedora customers.
There are users however, and shouldn't it be your goal to make your package as useable as it can be by as many users as possible -- taking into account their feedback (no matter how combative it may seem to the maintainer)?
That's not a question that can be answered with "yes" or "no". First of all, it's the "as many users as possible" that is too vague and makes it difficult to answer. And secondly, if there are many users who are unhappy with the package (and I refer to clamav as it has been in Fedora for a long time, not specifically to EPEL, as EPEL has other requirements), why don't any volunteers work on improving the packages? E.g. with an add-on package for a system-wide daemon, helper scripts, patches and a task-force that works together with the packager?
Feedback like "the clamav pkg is broken", which does not even try to follow the short instructions in the package documentation, won't convince the package maintainer.
It's not that the packager doesn't admit the manual configuration steps are inconvenient. There may be other reasons (e.g. lack of time) why it is still like that, and clamav add-on packages demonstrate how to set up services on top of the base clamav packages. There is no bugzilla ticket which clearly makes it a primary goal to improve/enhance/change the packages in well-defined ways. User satisfaction is not tracked anywhere. Every few months somebody tries to execute a non-executable script or ignores the documentation. And meanwhile, nobody else contributes any patches or co-maintainership. The packager is a volunteer like lots of the other packagers. In case of severe disagreement between him and what some people claim is a large portion of the clamav users it really may need somebody from FESCo to look into it. So, please start filing tickets, point out your concerns, get status updates from the maintainer, ...
Even if you don't consider "users" customers, the effects are the same. People will go elsewhere to fufill their need. And a packager that says "whoop dee doo I don't care" maybe isn't the best maintainer for that package. :)
With all due respect, but that paragraph above is only cheap talk IMO, which isn't helpful at all.