concept of package "ownership"

[Thomas Janssen]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Peter Czanik <pczanik at fang.fa.gau.hu> wrote:
> 2010-07-02 03:18 keltezéssel, Kevin Kofler írta:
>> Dave Airlie wrote:
>>
>>> So I've noticed maintainers of packages in Fedora seem to have a concept
>>> of ownership, and I'm wondering if we could remove that word from usage
>>> about maintainership.
>>>
>> +1
>>
>> IMHO any sponsored packager should be free to do changes which benefit the
>> Fedora Project to any package, no matter who officially maintains the
>> package. And such changes include things like upgrading the package to the
>> current upstream release in Rawhide, especially when that release is needed
>> for other packages. Even a provenpackager can't always make such changes
>> without getting yelled at.
>>
>> I think we need to get rid of the concept of ownership entirely, that'd also
>> make orphaned or de-facto orphaned packages less of a problem. You see a
>> problem, you fix it. Who cares whether the package has an active maintainer
>> or not?

Well, who's the one in charge for bugreports within that system?
Everyone? Nobody?
I see a lot of "who cares" and frustration coming up with that
"everyone builds what he think he have to build" system.

> +1
> I'd like to get syslog-ng updated to the latest version in Rawhide (I
> work part time for the upstream developer and I'm also an occasional
> Fedora user). I contacted the package owner, no response. Created a
> bugreport to get it updated (
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=598961 ), and also provided
> an updated package, which compiles and works fine on Fedora 12, 13 and
> Rawhide. After waiting for weeks, I started a maintainer time out. It
> was closed within an hour. I got some comments on bugzilla, but nothing
> happened ever since. The updated package was never downloaded from my
> website.
>
> What can I do in this situation? Obviously I'm not a proven packager to
> update the package myself, as I'm not a Fedora developer. I worked a lot
> to update and test the package, but still I'm stuck. And as you can see,
> the maintainer timeout procedure does not help either...

You have to accept the maintainers decision to not update it yet? What
do you think will happen if everyone builds the wishes he has and
breaks a lot of stuff with it? Anarchy? We have processes for that in
Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MikeKnox/AWOL_Maintainers

I'm really trying very hard to see it positive.

-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium