Draft guidelines for approving provenpackager

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "KF" == Kevin Fenzi  writes:

KF> On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:47:52 -0800
KF> Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:

> We don't currently have guidelines for granting access to proven
>> packager.  I took a work item from FESCo to create a draft for
>> this, and here is my first stab at it (words in camelcase exist to
>> be replaced with links to pages concerning them):

KF> Thanks for working on this!

>> Provenpackager is a group of highly skilled package maintainers who
>> are experienced in a wide variety of package types and who are
>> intimately familiar with the PackagingGuidelines and
>> MaintainerPolicies as well as acutely aware of ReleaseSchedules and
>> FreezePolicies.  They exist as a group to lend a hand when help is
>> needed, always with a desire to improve the quality of Fedora.  By
>> granting membership into provenpackager for a maintainer you are
>> confirming that at least in your mind they meet the above criteria
>> and that you would trust them fully with any of the packages you
>> either maintain or even just use.

KF> That sounds good to me.

KF> We might also want to mention and/or revisit/cleanup:
KF> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/WhoIsAllowedToModifyWhichPackages
KF> now as well.

So is provenpackager going to be reseeded with sponsors only?  If that
is so, I'll lose my current ability to fix packages as I am not a
sponsor at this time.  I have particularly focused on fixing broken
deps in rawhide (my pet peeve, especially close to releases) for the
last few release cycles and I hope my work has been useful.

I thought the initial way of seeding the list (i.e. maintainers with a
large number of packages) was fine, were there any cases where people
passed this threshold and then went abused (inadvertantly or
otherwise) their ability to commit and build a larger number of
packages?

I fear that if the bar for provenpackager is raised too high
(i.e. only sponsors) and requires too many hoops to jump through to
get in, then my motivation to work on Fedora will be severely
curtailed and I suspect there may be others.  Please individually
consider the work of the maintainers in the current provenpackager
list have been doing before removing them en-masse.

Related to this, it seems that there are still maintainers who appear
to want to lock up their packages even from "provenpackager".  As a
concrete example, user "rezso" (I've requested him to re-open them in
private e-mail to no avail) locked down several of his packages such
as:

http://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/mapserver
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/mapnik
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/gdal

These are packages that regularly needs to be rebuilt when sonames are
bumped and frequently lies dormant in a "broken deps" state for weeks
at a time and would benefit being available to provenpackagers to
rebuild.  (It's currently broken right now because of the MySQL soname
bump and there's no good reason why it shouldn't be available for
provenpackager to fix it).

Alex