FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-03-20

Horst H. von Brand vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl
Fri Mar 21 17:47:50 UTC 2008


"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.
> 
> I don't fundamentally disagree with that, but the problem in the Java
> case was that we had a lot of packages which were being done in several
> different, incompatible ways, and no one in the larger reviewer pool was
> capable of doing qualified reviews of those packages. The packages
> already in the distribution were of widely varying quality, and many new
> packages were being "reviewed" as two man efforts (two packagers tag
> team and review each others packages by simply saying "APPROVED").

[....]

Essentially, then, several ways of handling the Java packages where
competing. No consensus came out on its own, even after asking nicely;
the comittee then put its foot down hard.

That way of handling such cases is OK with me.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513




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