leaving fedora

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 03:07:22PM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>
> As someone who is now a day maintaining xfig and ImageMagick (not listed 
> but sort of fits in the list), let me chime in here. I think the biggest 

I haven't listed everything I used, but indeed, fits here.

> So what can we do to make this better? Simple become a co-maintainer and 
> fix any issues yourself. That is how I did things with xfig and 
> ImageMagick when I got fed up with ping-ing in bugzilla (officially I'm 
> still a co-maintainer of both, but in practice I seem to be the 
> maintainer).

That's also how I helped with a2ps, I would have liked to do the same 
for xdm. Also, as can be seen in packagedb, I watch over some 'core' 
packages I used, at least to help against mistakes.

> So I hereby call on everyone who care about these older tools: if it 
> itches scratch. I know that many of you have probably submitted bugs with 
> patches. That is not going to work when a package maintainer is 
> overworked. The solution in my experience is to become a co-maintainer 
> and do any fixes yourself.

That only works if the maintainer accepts, and at least show some
interest in the potential co-maintainer. I devised a policy with Rahul 
to force co-maintainership when maintainers didn't answered to patches 
and solutions but it got turned down. It is clear that this is not a 
policy I am very fond of, it is a rather harsh policy, so I don't 
think that this is a bad thing that it got turned down, but I really
wanted to have things moved on, and I couldn't see anything else than
constraint.


That being said, I am quite convinced that people more interested 
will take over those oldish packages over time. But it still isn't 
enough to have them rightly integrated. As I said in my mail, on the 
packaging side things are perfect. Some time ago fvwm and icewm weren't
in fedora, now they are here, and there is also all the lxde stuff
which is very nice. I have done halevt to be able to mount my usb key
automatically, and a hack to have the sessions in xdm, there is 
perl-File-MimeInfo for xdg-open to work in old 'desktops', acpitool
for the acpi and I certainly forget about other similar useful 
packages.

However all those packages never worked correctly at the same 
time in fedora (though they worked for me with modified or additional 
packages), because of constant changes in 'core' packages. The 
other issue being the ability to disable and remove 'core' packages
that I don't need, it still isn't possible. The issue here is really 
integration and not packaging.

--
Pat