Review queue/FESCo after the merge

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 14.11.2007 19:22, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 06:44:56PM +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> CCing fedora-advisory-board
>> Some of them are quite old. And the list of course doesn't include those
>> bugs that got closed as the packager lost interest over time.
> I am not sure that these numbers make much sense. Because the merge
> review are special for a number of reason.

Sure they are -- but with the current rate we'll finish them by Fedora
12. By then we likely should already have start a re-review of the
oldest packages to see what cruft made it into them over the years since
review.

Which brings me to my "slightly more wiki style approach" -- currently I
now and then see some errors in spec files (even in my own). I often
ignore most them which I locate in other peoples packages because
preparing a patch, submitting it via bugzilla is a to much work for
small fixes. Simply submitting them to CVS would be way easier.

That's why I think experienced packagers and/or a review group should be
allowed to do such changes directly in CVS -- devel branch only and not
in the four weeks right before a release is scheduled of course. That
group with some hand-made scripts could even grep for common errors in
the devel branch and simply just fix then with a sed call within some
minutes. Currently it would require lots of mails, new bugs and
contributer poking, because modifying other peoples packages in
Fedora-land is frowned upon.

That way we could improve package quality throughout the distro. And
even things that slipped through review would get fixed.

>  [...]
>> Why do you think it's bad? Because I more and more often hear in private
>> that contributers are unhappy. I also got the impression that people are
>> more and more unwilling to participate in discussions and on lists. And
>> there are no new leaders emerging in FESCo/packaging-land (the low
>> number of people that volunteered during the FESCo election is one
>> reasons for this opinion; or look at FPC -- according to the wiki the
>> same people since one year; there is also next-to no interest by
>> non-committee-members in participating in the meetings).
> 
> I am also worried by the fact that the wiki is always lagging behind, 
> this is something that should especially be followed by FESCo, even 
> though it is a wiki.

Yeah, maintaining the wiki is a boring job :-/ Sometimes I think that a
owner per wiki-page might be a good idea -- he could roughly oversee
changes, coordinate them and now and them just look at each page with
his "is it sill up2date"-glasses.

> But I am not sure that te number of reviews pending is something FESCo
> can do a lot about.

Well, I think FESCo should watch it and look where changes in hte
process are needed to keep everything working.

CU
knurd