FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-03-20

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2008-03-20 at 22:09 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2008-03-21 at 01:18 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Fedora is about showcasing the latest technology, if each time a new technology 
> > is introduced, we have to wait months to get a packaging guideline for it, and 
> > all packages using the new technology are blocked on that, where does that 
> > leave us?
> 
> I've always viewed guidelines as being a codification of best practices
> that have been proven in production. With that in mind, the whole idea
> of writing guidelines *before* packages have been put in to production
> is completely backwards. The writing of new guidelines should go
> hand-in-hand with the deployment of the first few "new technology"
> packages. It shouldn't block it. The finalization and ratification
> should happen *after* they have proven themselves in practice.

Is this not what's being done? We had a bunch of OCaml packages, and
then we wrote up guidelines for packaging them. We have a bunch of Java
packages, and we're working on guidelines for those...

Although I'm not sure I'd always agree with you anyway. Sometimes you
_can_ plan ahead; it's not as if the problems which the guidelines serve
to solve/avoid are are _entirely_ unpredictable.

- 
dwmw2