Why are updates processed so slowly?

[Sven Lankes]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 01:00:31PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:

>> Until the signing server happens, how does one apply to be such a
>> human?

> The best way to help out is to help the releng team do things other than
> the package signing.  We have a ticketing system at
> https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng and we meet weekly if you want to start
> lending a hand.

My first reaction after reading this was: wow - he might be taking "I am
Fedora" a wee bit too serious.

What I know about the signing process is this:

It's a process that involves a super secret and pretty important
password/key combination and thus hasn't been automated yet. Work is
being done to have signing server do the work and make the manual part
go away.

Less than five people are able to do pushes for fedora (correct me if
I'm wrong - read that number on some random irc channel recently) but
most of the time they're done by Jesse Keating.

Now your argument is: help us to reduce the general rel-eng load and
Jesse Keating will have more time to do the pushes (until the signing
server is in place). 

That doesn't really sound like it's going to work - there is always a
lot to do especially around Alpha-, Beta-, RC-, Final-Release time and
having someone (or multiple people) who are not as deeply involved in
those releases would be a big plus for securing the general update flow
in fedora-stable and -testing-land.

Are there other reasons for being so protective about this?

-- 
sven === jabber/xmpp: sven at lankes.net