Draft: simple update description guidelines

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 11:59 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 20:49 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >  
> > Whatever:  I don't care much about this specific set of rules. It just 
> > seems to me a general trend that more and more rules and guidelines are 
> > put into place in Fedora-land; and more and more work is outsourced onto 
> > the packagers. Sure, some of the rules and the outsourcing is needed -- 
> > but I find this trend very alarming.
> 
> The alarming trend is the folks who won't do things, unless there is a
> guideline for them.  I hate having an abundance of guidlines just like
> you do, however almost all the recent guidelines have been done in
> reaction to a lack of people following "best practices".  Ergo we create
> guidelines to /help/ people understand what those best practices are.

Yeah, documenting best practices is better than having this stuff as a
body of folklore that new contributors only learn by making mistakes and
getting flamed.

IMHO, though, all of these types of guidelines should end with "but
you're the maintainer, use your own common sense and judgement and you
shouldn't go too far wrong".

We don't need rules to bash people over the head with, but rather we
want to help people understand how to be good packagers.

Cheers,
Mark.