No answer to easy bug policy

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:21:12 +0200, David Nielsen wrote:

> Be careful not to regulate Fedora to death.

So, then the typical "there's no silver bullet" warning here.

We do need guidelines for collaboration and to remove bottle-necks, where
maintainers are too busy to handle incoming bz mail. Perhaps they focus on
devel and don't mind if somebody else applies a patch to F-8 or F-9?

These policy documents, however, try to cover each and everything, not
taking into account which actual problems we run into regularly and
frequently. There are multiple related policies already. Much too complex
and tedious.

Are there many examples of where someone is waiting long for an easy patch
to be applied? Do we have examples of patches where there is disagreement
about whether the patch is fine? What damage is done if existing patches are
published as test updates? Is it just the theoretical threat that a patch
breaks very badly and is worse than no bug-fix?

This is about package maintainers who neglect packages in the eyes of the
bug reporters or contributors. This is about bugs with existing fixes, but
without anybody to prepare and push updates. This is not about forcing
maintainers to do major version upgrades, and it shouldn't be about
forcing them to orphan a package. I don't want to see a backdoor for
version fanatics who want the very latest upstream release on every
branch and who just wait for a minor bug to push a major version upgrade
while a maintainer cannot be reached for two weeks.