Meeting summary/notes from today's EPEL meeting 2010-02-12

[BJ Dierkes]

Minutes:
	http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-02-12/fedora-meeting...
Minutes (text):
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-02-12/fedora-meeting...
Log:   
	http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-02-12/fedora-meeting...

---
derks

[Till Maas]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:49:08PM -0600, BJ Dierkes wrote:

>  Log:   
> 	http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-02-12/fedora-meeting...
From the log:
21:19:15 <stickster> so that engineers inside Red Hat understand they
need to be working with EPEL as an upstream
21:19:27 <derks> that's great
21:19:52 <stickster> The unanimous response I got from the folks I
talked to was, "Yup, we're doing that now, and will keep doing so"

This seems not to have worked for "python-setuptools", because when it
was added to RHEL, an older version that the on in EPEL was used. Also
the RHEL package does not provide "python-setuptools-devel". A related
ignored bug report is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=460631

For this package, it EPEL land it does not look better, as the CVS does
not contain a dead.package:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/python-setuptools/EL-5/

Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it seems
that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not maintained,
e.g. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL contains a log of stale
content:

Latest report on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Reports is from
2008, week 17

Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0] procedure is not in sync
with what CVS admins require, as they might require a confirmation that
a maintainer has been asked:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
But this is not what the procedure describes.

Regards
Till

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_a_Fedora_package_in_EPEL

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 01:19:20PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
>  On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:49:08PM -0600, BJ Dierkes wrote:
>  
>  21:19:27 <derks> that's great
>  21:19:52 <stickster> The unanimous response I got from the folks I
>  talked to was, "Yup, we're doing that now, and will keep doing so" 
I could never get in touch with the openmotif maintainer to do something
consistent between fedora/RHEL/EPEL for motif based software (like
consistent virtual provides). After some attemps I gave up, but it was 
when I was more active in Fedora/EPEL so some time ago, maybe things 
have changed since then.

>  Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it
> seems
>  that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not maintained,
>  e.g. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL contains a log of stale
>  content:
>  
>  Latest report on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Reports is from
>  2008, week 17 
Apart from Reports are there specific parts that are out of date? I
tried to review the whole EPEL wiki in the end of 2008, I don't think
that there were much changes afterwards, except from switching to bodhi
and koji, and I just checked that this has been rightly taken into 
account.

In fact the 'moving' parts of the EPEL wiki have always been late
(like report meetings, schedule and things like that) but the remaining
should be ok now. The FAQ is marked to be needing love, but, honestly 
I can't see serious issues.

>  Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0] procedure is
> not in sync
>  with what CVS admins require, as they might require a confirmation that
>  a maintainer has been asked:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
>  But this is not what the procedure describes. 
It is not clear that the problem here is with the documented guidelines.
Have these guidelines changed? Or are the CVS admins having claims they
shouldn't have? I'd lean to the second, though I may have missed a guideline
change.

--
Pat

[Till Maas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:11:13PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>  On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 01:19:20PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
>  > On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:49:08PM -0600, BJ Dierkes wrote:
>  > 
>  > 21:19:27 <derks> that's great
>  > 21:19:52 <stickster> The unanimous response I got from the folks I
>  > talked to was, "Yup, we're doing that now, and will keep doing so"
>  
>  I could never get in touch with the openmotif maintainer to do something
>  consistent between fedora/RHEL/EPEL for motif based software (like
>  consistent virtual provides). After some attemps I gave up, but it was 
>  when I was more active in Fedora/EPEL so some time ago, maybe things 
>  have changed since then.
>  
>  > Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it seems
>  > that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not maintained,
>  > e.g. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL contains a log of stale
>  > content:
>  > 
>  > Latest report on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Reports is from
>  > 2008, week 17
>  
>  Apart from Reports are there specific parts that are out of date? I
>  tried to review the whole EPEL wiki in the end of 2008, I don't think
>  that there were much changes afterwards, except from switching to bodhi
>  and koji, and I just checked that this has been rightly taken into 
>  account.
>  
>  In fact the 'moving' parts of the EPEL wiki have always been late
>  (like report meetings, schedule and things like that) but the remaining
>  should be ok now. The FAQ is marked to be needing love, but, honestly 
>  I can't see serious issues. 
Without having Reports or links to Meeting summaries from Meetbot, it is
very hard to know what has changed. I noticed that there seems to be no
information about what happened to python-setuptools in EPEL or what
would happen the next time a package is imported in RHEL, that existed
in EPEL. Or for which other packages this already happened.

Also there was this discussion on the list and meetings about what
exactly the package set in RHEL is, that EPEL does not conflict with,
but there seems to be no real answer to this in the wiki, too.

E.g. the FAQ only says to browse the SRPMS, but it's only some of the
SRPMS:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_know_which_packages_are...

The policy says this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
| EPEL packages must never conflict with packages in RHEL Base (Including
| Advanced Platform).

This might be the actual policy, but it still does not says which
packages this includes and when I asked on this mailing list, even
someone more experienced than me did not really know.

Btw. this FAQ entry also contains some broken wiki syntax:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#What_is_the_policy_on_updates_for...

Then as you already mentioned, the Schedule probably only contains
outdated content:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Schedule

>  > Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0]
> procedure is not in sync
>  > with what CVS admins require, as they might require a confirmation that
>  > a maintainer has been asked:
>  > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
>  > But this is not what the procedure describes.
>  
>  It is not clear that the problem here is with the documented guidelines.
>  Have these guidelines changed? Or are the CVS admins having claims they
>  shouldn't have? I'd lean to the second, though I may have missed a guideline
>  change. 
I don't know, I only experienced that both conflicted.

Regards
Till

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:44:20 +0100
Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote:

>  Without having Reports or links to Meeting summaries from Meetbot,
> it
>  is very hard to know what has changed.  
I personally don't have time to generate any reports, and the old
scripts that Thorsten used are likely not going to work against
koji/bodhi. 

Would you be interested in generating a new weekly report? 

The meeting summaries are posted to this list, as well as being on the
meetbot site. 

>  I noticed that there seems to
>  be no information about what happened to python-setuptools in EPEL or
>  what would happen the next time a package is imported in RHEL, that
>  existed in EPEL. Or for which other packages this already happened. 
My understanding is that RHEL would import the most recent package from
EPEL and we would block it. Sadly this has not happened correctly in
the past. 

>  Also there was this discussion on the list and meetings about what
>  exactly the package set in RHEL is, that EPEL does not conflict with,
>  but there seems to be no real answer to this in the wiki, too.
>  
>  E.g. the FAQ only says to browse the SRPMS, but it's only some of the
>  SRPMS:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_know_which_packages_are...
>
>  The policy says this:
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
>  | EPEL packages must never conflict with packages in RHEL Base
>  (Including | Advanced Platform).
>  
>  This might be the actual policy, but it still does not says which
>  packages this includes and when I asked on this mailing list, even
>  someone more experienced than me did not really know. 
I have added clarification on this. 

This is basically anything in the server or workstation for RHEL5, and anything in base
RHEL4. 
This would be ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/4/en/os
and ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Client and 
ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Server. 
 
>  Btw. this FAQ entry also contains some broken wiki syntax:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#What_is_the_policy_on_updates_for...
It's a wiki. Can you not fix such things when you see them? ;) 
I just removed that broken include and pointed to the real doc. 

>  Then as you already mentioned, the Schedule probably only contains
>  outdated content:
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Schedule 
Cleaned up. 

>  I don't know, I only experienced that both conflicted. 
Added some more wording. 

Any help cleaning up wiki pages is very welcome. 

kevin

[Till Maas]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 02:37:08PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:44:20 +0100
>  Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote:
>  
>  > Without having Reports or links to Meeting summaries from Meetbot, it
>  > is very hard to know what has changed. 
>  
>  I personally don't have time to generate any reports, and the old
>  scripts that Thorsten used are likely not going to work against
>  koji/bodhi. 
>  
>  Would you be interested in generating a new weekly report?  
I am not really interested in the package statistics, so no.

>  The meeting summaries are posted to this list, as well as being on
> the
>  meetbot site.  
But I am interested in an easy access to the Meetbot logs. Is this the
meetbot site you are talking about: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/ ?

AFAICS there is no easy way to get all EPEL meetbot summaries from
there. Or in other words, the only way seems to be to go through all
summaries from all groups.

>  > I noticed that there seems to
>  > be no information about what happened to python-setuptools in EPEL or
>  > what would happen the next time a package is imported in RHEL, that
>  > existed in EPEL. Or for which other packages this already happened.
>  
>  My understanding is that RHEL would import the most recent package from
>  EPEL and we would block it. Sadly this has not happened correctly in
>  the past.  
Ok, this would not cause any issues afaics.

>  > Btw. this FAQ entry also contains some broken wiki syntax:
>  >
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#What_is_the_policy_on_updates_for...
>  
>  It's a wiki. Can you not fix such things when you see them? ;) 
>  I just removed that broken include and pointed to the real doc.  
I would have fixed it, if was something I do already know how to fix it.
I did not assume that it should be just removed.

>  > Then as you already mentioned, the Schedule probably only
> contains
>  > outdated content:
>  > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Schedule
>  
>  Cleaned up.  
I just looked at it and found two issues:
I guess this is not used anymore? Or is it somehow managed using
meetbot?
| feel free to add your nick to the list of nicks in the "meeting ping"

Also the topic changes are done using "/topic" instead of "#topic". I
never used meetbot, so maybe it matters, maybe it does not:
| /topic EPEL SIG Meeting | Status Reports | Revive them?

There is also a link to this page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
I guess it can be moved to the archive namespace and requested for
deletion? Or even all pages in
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:EPELTasksOpen except for
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/NextTestingStableMove unless
this is documented somewhere else.

>  > I don't know, I only experienced that both conflicted.
>  
>  Added some more wording. 
>  
>  Any help cleaning up wiki pages is very welcome.  
If I know that something is wrong and I know what is right instead, I
happily fix this in the wiki. But if I do not know the details, I
typically do not edit it to avoid making it worse. IMHO it would be nice
to have some easy way to create patches for the wiki, send them to
somebody that has the knowledge, so that he can just verify the changes
and apply them. Then the work can still be shared, but this is more
dreaming then reality.

Regards
Till

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:32:26 +0100
Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote:

>  I am not really interested in the package statistics, so no. 
ok

>  > The meeting summaries are posted to this list, as well as being
> on
>  > the meetbot site. 
>  
>  But I am interested in an easy access to the Meetbot logs. Is this the
>  meetbot site you are talking about:
>  http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/ ? 
Yes. 

>  AFAICS there is no easy way to get all EPEL meetbot summaries from
>  there. Or in other words, the only way seems to be to go through all
>  summaries from all groups. 
Well, the meeting is prefixed with 'epel' so it should be good to pick
it out. I agree there should be a better way to search or download all
the meeting's from a particular group. 

There is ongoing work to setup a search engine for all fedora
resources. 

>  I just looked at it and found two issues:
>  I guess this is not used anymore? Or is it somehow managed using
>  meetbot?
>  | feel free to add your nick to the list of nicks in the "meeting
>  ping" 
Yeah, it's not used anymore. I guess we could just remove that. 

>  Also the topic changes are done using "/topic" instead of
> "#topic". I
>  never used meetbot, so maybe it matters, maybe it does not:
>  | /topic EPEL SIG Meeting | Status Reports | Revive them? 
Yeah, should be #topic for meetbot. 

>  There is also a link to this page:
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/Misc
>  I guess it can be moved to the archive namespace and requested for
>  deletion? Or even all pages in
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:EPELTasksOpen except for
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Tasks/NextTestingStableMove unless
>  this is documented somewhere else. 
yes. I think they can be deleted/archives. 

>  If I know that something is wrong and I know what is right instead,
> I
>  happily fix this in the wiki. But if I do not know the details, I
>  typically do not edit it to avoid making it worse. IMHO it would be
>  nice to have some easy way to create patches for the wiki, send them
>  to somebody that has the knowledge, so that he can just verify the
>  changes and apply them. Then the work can still be shared, but this
>  is more dreaming then reality. 
Yeah, that would be nice for sure. 

If you have questions, feel free to ping me on irc and I will be happy
to answer as time permits and then you can update the wiki. ;) 

kevin

[Till Maas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:11:13PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:

>  Apart from Reports are there specific parts that are out of date? I
>  tried to review the whole EPEL wiki in the end of 2008, I don't think
>  that there were much changes afterwards, except from switching to bodhi
>  and koji, and I just checked that this has been rightly taken into 
>  account. 
I forgot something: I believe  the epel component in the rel-eng trac
and the use cases are also not mentioned in the wiki.

Regards
Till

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:15:44 +0100
Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote:

>  On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:11:13PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>  
>  > Apart from Reports are there specific parts that are out of date? I
>  > tried to review the whole EPEL wiki in the end of 2008, I don't
>  > think that there were much changes afterwards, except from
>  > switching to bodhi and koji, and I just checked that this has been
>  > rightly taken into account.
>  
>  I forgot something: I believe  the epel component in the rel-eng trac
>  and the use cases are also not mentioned in the wiki. 
Added a note about this to the faq. 

kevin

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 01:19:20PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
>  
>  Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it seems
>  that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not maintained, 
One thing that was not completly done, as far as I can tell is 
the renaming of pages, though they were proposed:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2008-October/msg00124.html

and I answered

https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2008-November/msg00008.html

I think basically everything was ready, but some pages don't seem to
have been renamed.

--
Pat

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:23:32 +0100
Patrice Dumas <pertusus(a)free.fr&gt; wrote:

>  I think basically everything was ready, but some pages don't seem
> to
>  have been renamed. 
Who was going to do this? You or Karsten?

Can you go ahead and do it? or I can ask Karsten to do so. 

kevin

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 02:38:33PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:23:32 +0100
>  Patrice Dumas <pertusus(a)free.fr&gt; wrote:
>  
>  > I think basically everything was ready, but some pages don't seem to
>  > have been renamed.
>  
>  Who was going to do this? You or Karsten? 
It was Karsten, I think, since, unless I am wrong it was part of
a change more global, and, although I am guessing, maybe they 
fixed the links automatically when renaming pages, and used some
scripting to avoid the tedious task of doing everything by hand 
in the wiki.

--
Pat

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:19:20 +0100
Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote:

>  On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:49:08PM -0600, BJ Dierkes wrote:
>  
>  > Log:
>  >
> http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-02-12/fedora-meeting...
>  
>  From the log:
>  21:19:15 <stickster> so that engineers inside Red Hat understand they
>  need to be working with EPEL as an upstream
>  21:19:27 <derks> that's great
>  21:19:52 <stickster> The unanimous response I got from the folks I
>  talked to was, "Yup, we're doing that now, and will keep doing so"
>  
>  This seems not to have worked for "python-setuptools", because when it
>  was added to RHEL, an older version that the on in EPEL was used. Also
>  the RHEL package does not provide "python-setuptools-devel". A related
>  ignored bug report is:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=460631
>  
>  For this package, it EPEL land it does not look better, as the CVS
>  does not contain a dead.package:
>  http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/python-setuptools/EL-5/ 
Perhaps we can get stickster to communicate that back to RHEL folks.
Or give us some more direct way of doing so. I will ask him to comment
on this thread. 

>  Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it
>  seems that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not
>  maintained, e.g. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL contains a log
>  of stale content:
>  
>  Latest report on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Reports is from
>  2008, week 17 
I can clean that up. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. 
We no longer do regular reports. 

>  Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0] procedure is
> not in
>  sync with what CVS admins require, as they might require a
>  confirmation that a maintainer has been asked:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
>  But this is not what the procedure describes.
>  
>  [0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_a_Fedora_package_in_EPEL 
I can add clarification there. Basically he was just asking: "have you
talked to the Fedora maintainer about maintaining this in EPEL". 

The answer could just have been "yes, I have". 

kevin

[Till Maas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:29:48PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:19:20 +0100
>  Till Maas <opensource(a)till.name&gt; wrote: 
>  > Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0]
> procedure is not in
>  > sync with what CVS admins require, as they might require a
>  > confirmation that a maintainer has been asked:
>  > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
>  > But this is not what the procedure describes.
>  > 
>  > [0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_a_Fedora_package_in_EPEL
>  
>  I can add clarification there. Basically he was just asking: "have you
>  talked to the Fedora maintainer about maintaining this in EPEL". 
>  
>  The answer could just have been "yes, I have".  
Are you sure? Because I believe I told him in IRC that the gitolite
maintainer asked the perl-Text-Markdown maintainer via e-mail, because
the gitolite maintainer wrote this in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=548324#c20, which I referred
to in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c11

Also on IRC the CVS admin said something that the perl-Text-Markdown
maintainer required that he acked all EL branch requests, before they
would be performed. Hey also used this in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c12

Nevertheless, if there was only some miscommunication and it still will
be enough to just ask the maintainer and mention this on a branch
request to get the branch for EPEL done, then everything is fine.

Regards
Till