Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mardi 13 mai 2008 à 10:47 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi a écrit :
>>  
>> And why are the jpackage tomcat RPMS upstream for our RPMS?  It seems 
>> quite plain from the changelog you quoted that they are not.
> 
> So the kernel packages are not downstreamed from kernel.org? They have a
> lot more fedora-specific patches.
> 
1) Last I looked, kernel.org didn't release SRPMS.

2) The Fedora Tomcat package does not currently seem to be syncing 
against JPackage.  So JPackage is not the upstream for the tomcat 
package.  The source code in the kernel package, otoh, is being synced 
against the source code on upstream kernel.org.

> The fedora packages are rebased every once in a while. That's why it's
> an upstream/downstream thing. The parts which are shared and reused are
> bigger than the parts Fedora-specific (very often because the changes
> have not been bushed jpp-side)
> 
But that's not the case with the current tomcat package.  The current 
tomcat is a derivation of JPackage because it was started from the 
JPackage package (by a different maintainer) but is not syncing changes 
back and forth now.  And there's nothing in FESCo policy or Packaging 
Guidelines that mandate that this must happen.

>> Does there need to be a stronger connection between Fedora and JPackage 
>> with a policy?  Something that states that all Fedora java packages must 
>> be in JPackage first and be based off of them?  The results of this 
>> discussion will probably influence that.  
> 
> Note that has never been a demand. The demand has been to avoid
> needlessly making the package flow and collaboration harder.
> 
Very true.  I'm saying that our current process is falling down.  We 
aren't to the point where we're getting the worst of both worlds (the 
two worlds being: making packages which are totally separate from 
JPackage and making packages which are only rebuilds of JPackage [or 
even just including the JPackage repo]) but we're definitely not getting 
the best of them.  I think we need to swing the pendulum one way or the 
other.

-Toshio