Fedora clean up process seems to be seriously broken...

[Emanuel Rietveld]

Hi.

I'm interested in helping out (comaintainer?), but I'm a little scared -
I don't know much about java yet, nor java packaging guidelines, or
whatever relevant guidelines, and I might need a little handholding.

Maybe you can give me something useful but not urgent that you need
done, that is easy for you to check if I did it right, and I can work on it?

Emanuel

On 11/22/2011 09:51 AM, Aleksandar Kurtakov wrote:
> Can I be added to the list of maintainers that need help very badly from the beginning?
> I maintain a number of packages that are very low in the Java stack and would force the whole Java stack to be removed if they are removed but noone wants to maintain them.
> That's how I gained them! If such a policy is adopted it would be very bad decision if there isn't a mechanism prior to that for maintainers to list packages that they maintain to keep the distro integrity but don't care about them personally. I bet that there would be a very big list of maintainers that would list a number of there packages in this list.
> To give a better estimate - I'm owner of 69 packages(139 comaintainer) of these I would like to maintain only 11 (eclipse*) packages but the rest is crucial to something. The problem should be obvious now - I would like to list this 58 packages as something I need help with. And to explain things better - yes I do fix bugs when they arrive in this packages- but just a real bugs (broken functionality, crashers, etc.) and let aside bugs asking for new version update, new functionality, pony:) until I need them. It's volunteer based effort and NOONE has the right to put more burden on packagers or you will lose them. 
> And everyone stop telling the story about disappointed bug reporters, why noone is saying about disappointed maintainers? My experience is quite the opposite at least 7 out of 10 bug reports are from people that don't want to help. I'm speaking for bug reports that stay needing info from reporters for weeks and months before I close them as INSUFFICIENT_DATA. If a decision to orphan packages is made a similar decision should be made to ban bugzilla accounts that don't respond to information requests from maintainers. If a packager is losing time for reporters if he doesn't respond, there are for sure reporters that lose time of the packagers. In my case they lose me so much time that I would have probably fixed some of the bugs that I haven't responded to!!!
> Does the previous paragraph sounds right? HELL NO!! There should be an effort to make more people help as much as they can (even if it's one day per year), not an effort to put more burden on people that are already doing work.
>
>
> Pissed by the constant efforts to draw maintainers as lazy and non-responsive,
> Alexander Kurtakov
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kevin Fenzi" <kevin at scrye.com>
> To: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 12:36:39 AM
> Subject: Re: Fedora clean up process seems to be seriously broken...
>
> On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:03:43 -0800
> Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
>
>> This has come up nearly every release cycle.  Problem is that nobody
>> can seem to agree on what an appropriate "sign of life" would be, no
>> has made a serious FESCo proposal for a contrived sign of life.
>>
>> I don't think anybody disagrees (well maybe KKoffler) that
>> unmaintained software should be discovered and ejected from the
>> distro, the entirety of the problem lies how to discover (as well as
>> side issues about what to do about maintainers that are active for
>> one package, but completely ignore 3 others, etc…)
>>
>> So if you are serious about wanting this fixed, draft a proposal,
>> figure out who's going to do the coding work, and bring it to FESCo.
> To quote Ajax: +!
>
> I think the current policy is not very ideal either, but haven't had
> time/energy to work out a new one. ;) 
>
> My last thought was to come up with a automated/script way to gather
> info from: bugzilla, pkgdb, koji, git, mailing lists, etc and output a
> list of 'likely inactive people'. Then, have a group of humans look at
> the list, and try and contact/ping people. With no reply after a
> timeperiod, orphan their packages. 
>
> Note that we need to balance here cases like: 
>
> * maintainer is very active, just ignoring $leafpackage right now. 
> * maintainer is on vacation/sick/etc
> * maintainer needs help, we should try and help them out. 
> * maintainer doesn't use our bugzilla as their primary bug zone. 
> * maintainer maintains a software that has a vast number of bugs and
>   they can't deal with them all. 
> * maintainer is working on higher priority bug, so ignoring feature
>   requests/etc. 
>
> Anyhow, I for one would welcome written up, concrete proposals here. 
>
> kevin
>
>
>