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

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:18:11 -0600, RS (Richard) wrote:

> I didn't imply that there should be less documentation or guidelines,
> only that it's more than a person can "grok" at one time. 

That's too vague for me to understand it.

Some topics are covered by entire books, for example even several
commercial books about RPM exist in addition to the documentation that can
be read online. To stick to the example of RPM packaging, the Fedora Wiki
tries to sum up the basics already, in HOWTOs such as:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_a_GNU_Hello_RPM_package

One needs to start *somewhere*, also when starting to read a book.
How terse can it get while still being helpful and without neglecting to
comment on stuff that's really relevant to most packages?

There is no Fedora specific documentation that tries to serve as an
elementary course on C, C++, GCC, or GNU Autotools, for example. How many
manual pages, info files, and books can a person "grok at one time"? It
may be necessary to gain experience the learning-by-doing way and by learning
from others, who either know the guidelines in detail or who give
explanations beyond what's covered by the guidelines.

> My thoughts
> are that it would be better if there was some way to ease people into
> it, just as in school you don't go straight to Calculus or DE, but
> start with geometry and then algebra and you work your way up to the
> more complicated stuff, building your knowledge base as you go.

You sound as if you've found an area of Fedora you could try to improve.
That might be much more productive than trying to convince others of flaws
you've discovered. Whether you would work on new pages in the Wiki or do
Fedora IRC classroom sessions, I dunno.

I'd like to add that it's much more fun to work with potential
contributors, who ask questions and show interest, than those who sit and
wait somewhere without any questions/comments on the guidelines. The FPC
regularly spends time on improving the guidelines whenever there is
feedback on them.

The package review process and the packager sponsoring procedure is
supposed to be some hurdle. Potential contributors are expected to show
some level of perseverance, some sort of prove that they are willing to
become a Fedora contributor. If it were too easy to dump a package into
the distribution (and there really are some, who lump together a package
based on a src.rpm they've found somewhere, announcing that they want this
to be include in Fedora without being the ones to maintain it), I assume
we would have a lot more problems with packagers, who drop off silently as
soon as they receive a few bug reports or run into problems related to
their package(s).