Meeting summary/minutes for 2010-03-09 FESCo meeting

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Wednesday, 10 March 2010 at 16:22, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 13:08 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> 
> > Afaics this does not affect some minor issue, but a fundamental reason
> > why package maintainer decided to become Fedora package maintainers.
> > No volunteer package maintainer is in general forced to create updates
> > and I am very sure that the volunteer package maintainers usually do not
> > create updates that they do not want to use. So if you forbid package
> > maintainers to package the version they want or need to use, being a
> > fedora package maintainer becomes pretty useless for them.
> 
> I really think we want to have package maintainers whose motivation is a
> bit stronger than 'I use this myself, so, meh, why not package it'.

Why is that not motivation enough? Why wouldn't we want to have this kind
of people on board (assuming they follow the packaging guidelines and what
not)? Packaging isn't rocket science.

In fact, my motivation for packaging lots of stuff was: "Hmm, my colleagues
use this and they use Fedora so why not package it and save them the effort?"
In return, I ask them to test new releases. Even if they don't have time to
use bodhi, their feedback is still most valuable.

As Tom wrote on FAB list, the real problem is making it easier for users
to give feedback on updates. Only after we've solved that can we start
thinking of imposing restrictions on package maintainers wrt updates.

> At
> least for packages that are part of the default install, I would expect
> at least some awareness on the part of the packager that the work he is
> doing needs to fit into the larger whole which is the released product.

Agreed. However, we should ask ourselves if it's better to have a package
in our distribution even if it doesn't fit ideally with the rest or not
to have it at all?

I prefer the latter. Someone might step up as co-maintainer and help.
Starting from scratch is usually more difficult.

Regards,
Dominik

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