Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 13 May 2008 13:38:51 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> Jason Corley wrote:
> >> Nicolas, I believe you're wrong. I can't find a single revision by devrim that syncs from the JPackage spec[1]_ to the Fedora spec.
> > 
> > Yes if you focus only on the current maintainer's history of
> > collaboration with JPackage you won't find any.  However the following
> > shows what used to happen:
> > 
> I don't dispute that.  But I am saying that a new maintainer took over 
> the package.  So there was no history of sharing changes with JPackage 
> there.  Continuity doesn't follow the package because there is no policy 
> or guideline that says that java packages have a special relationship 
> with JPackage.  the maintainer was just following the best practices 
> that they had established by working on other packages in Fedora.
> 
> Fedora is a community of packagers.  Those packagers have different 
> styles of packaging and working.  Where we need to, we unite those 
> styles with Packaging Guidelines and FESCo Policies.  Until we have a 
> policy that specifies that certain classes of packages must use JPackage 
> as upstream this kind of thing will happen as packages go through 
> different maintainers.

In addition to my earlier comment:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/JPackagePolicy

[...]

Fedora includes a set of open source Java RPM packages that originate
from the JPackage repository (www.jpackage.org). Currently, these
packages are marked with a "jpp" tag:

javacc-4.0-3jpp.3.src.rpm

These packages are rebuilt against Fedora's gcc and included in Fedora. They use the "jpp" tag for three main technical reasons:

    * to help manage upgrading packages from Fedora to JPackage and back

    * to track package hierarchy (this Fedora Java package came from that
      JPackage Java package) 

-snip-

You break with these two "main technical reasons" if you put "jpp" in
the evr only for the third technical reason (i.e. "group operations").