Summary of the 2008-02-12 Packaging Committee meeting

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Feb 12, 2008 5:26 PM, Yaakov Nemoy <loupgaroublond at gmail.com> wrote:
> My original goal was to get xmonad into Fedora.  I found that
> packaging Haskell packages requires some care, but can be done pretty
> quickly, so I decided doing things in full would be better.  My
> impression was that Bob and Jens were busy, and didn't have the time
> to push things forward, so I figured the best way to do this would be
> to do it myself.

I've no problem with you pushing things forward and having a detailed
plan. I love detailed plans.  But I didn't want this to come up on the
packaging committee agenda for a vote until other maintainers in the
Haskell space took a look at it.  The last thing we want to do is put
things into position for a vote and then find out that the other
maintainers who are directly affected by this have a serious
problem... the resulting discussion would be much less sane.
And it make the packaging committee look like bad guys for taking up
the issue. If anyone is going to look like bad, I'd rather it be me by
forcing people to actually talk to each other.

For anyone watching this thread, I'll sum it up. When designing new
guidance, you must take a proactive effort to communicate with other
maintainers who are working in the space your guidance is meant to
address before you bring this sort of thing to the packaging committee
as an agenda item.  The packaging committee are not experts in all
niche areas, there must be some discussion on record between
maintainers in the area in question concerning specialized guidance.

If you make the effort to make that discussion happen (which includes
bug tickets against existing packages and private emails to
maintainers if need be), and all you get is crickets... talk to me or
another board member. We'll figure out where the communication
breakdown is and do something about it to make sure your efforts
aren't just being silently ignored.   If what your working on is
crackrock, we'll make sure you know it.  If people are generally okay
with it, then we'll make sure people say that for the record.  If
there's collaboration that needs to be done to refine it...we'll make
sure there's a reasonable chance for that to happen before the
packaging committee takes it up.

-jef