Slightly OT: bad rap for Fedora, and realistic effects

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:55:22 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

> > > - Revoke sponsorship in the event that the person refuses to follow
> > > rules, and deal with that persons leftover packages. 
> > 
> > The second part is new to me. Leftover packages would be orphaned.
> 
> Sure, but there might be open bugs to close, other packages that depend
> on those packages that a new maintainer should be found for, binary
> rpms to remove from repositories, etc. 

Now it's getting interesting. Being a sponsor has never before implied
that you have to fix orphans or take over packages when a sponsored person
leaves the project or is AWOL. With such a requirement, the sponsorship
system would be too burdensome and too much of a risk.

> > > > * unclear role of FESCo, not enough steering -- instead: the drive
> > > > that "you don't need to be in FESCo to get something done",
> > > 
> > > What items do you think need addressing? 
> > 
> > Guiding the community to prepare for Fedora 7. The contributor
> > community needs a roadmap. There are 1129 fc6 packages (based on
> > their src.rpm name) in the devel tree, while Core has reached test2
> > already. The upgradecheck report lists several invalid upgrade paths.
> > The broken deps report lists other issues. The FE7Target tracker
> > lists even more issues. And I guarantee, more issues are undiscovered.
> 
> Of course. I attempted to clean up the EVR and broken dependency issues
> a while back and made some progress on it, but I have been trying to
> look at core merge reviews lately instead of working more on that. 
> I found that often you could find a solution to the issue, report a bug
> on it (with patch or offer to fix it) and the maintainer would happily
> accept it. 
> 
> What do you see such a roadmap containing?

Points that give the impression that there is the desire to have a product
ready when Fedora 7 will be released. When to have packages rebuilt and
ready, whether and when there will be any sort of freeze (especially with
regard to ABI and API breakage), "last resort"/"last minutes" procedures
for fixing packages where package owners have not met the deadline. I see
Matt Domsch' build failure report, I see the complicated and lengthy AWOL
procedure, I see that test2 is close, but Extras 7 is broken in many
areas, I see ACLs which lock down packages in CVS, and all that would
benefit from plans on how to bring Extras 7 in shape in time.