Apples and oranges (Was: Re: FC2 Wishlist Items)

Jef Spaleta jspaleta at princeton.edu
Tue Jan 13 14:32:27 UTC 2004


Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> A system like this is neither technically nor politically 
> complicated.  All it takes is enough imagination to see that 
> frictionless submission tools like fedora-submit, shipper, and the 
> soon-to-go-public bugzilla-submit are useful things

Yikes!!!!!! Calling other people unimaginative in what is suppose to be
a consensus process according to the leadership draft is probably not a
good way to keep the 'important' people listening to you in the
discussion.

> That degree of imagination is certainly present at cAos and
> freshmeat.net and the bugzilla project, all of whom are actively
> cooperating with my efforts to reduce the hassle factor in shipping
> releases.  I find it disappointing that such imagination seems to be
> in shorter supply here.

What you call hassle...i call at best healthy discussion..and at worse
premature discussion considering the state of affairs inside Fedora in
terms of public facing infrastructure. Maybe some people are playing
devil's advocate and maybe some aren't. But I think you are off base to
say that just because freshmeat.net sees this as a good idea and just
because cAos sees this as a good idea..that should be enough of a reason
for Fedora's community to see this as a good idea. Personally i think
you actually lose points by referring to freshmeat as a comparable
example..since freshmeat can't have the same constraints/demands on its
submission process...becuase freshmeat isn't trying to make sure all the
submissions work together. This was Miloslav's point I think,
freshmeat.net is a very bad comparison to make. And Miloslav's omission
of commenting on cAos pretty much implies he doesn't have a problem with
the cAos example. The whole topic of freshmeat.net as a comparable
example is troll-fodder, and Miloslav seems hungrier than most. 

Please instead of marching down the path of a scorched earth policy of
good will. Let's just admit freshmeat.net isn't the best compatible
example. Let's look instead to educating the Fedora community about the
cAos process and see if there are valuable lessons and ideas that can
influence the discussion about what the final fedora submission process
will look like. I'm pretty sure no one of merit, thinks there isn't room
for significant automation of the process, but what exactly the
automation looks like is going to be colored by other factors about how
much interaction the final policies demand between packager/submitter
and QA as part of the submission process. Using the current fedora.us
policy as a baseline (because its the only baseline that exists) I don't
see an inherent incompatibility between fedora.us's current policy and
setting up an incoming srpms/specs holding pin as a pre-QA que step.

-jef"i wonder how well the activities in the guide to brainstorming book
I own can be adapted to an internet communication forum, to prevent bad
blood and promote constructive brainstorming about
priorities/constraints and pros/cons"spaleta  





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