Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Nelson Marques]

No dia 26 de Abril de 2012 12:40, Adam Williamson
<awilliam at redhat.com> escreveu:
> On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 12:18 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:
>
>> I was asked by a upstream to maintain a package for Fedora due to the
>> high demand it has from Fedora users, unfortunatly I backed down from
>> the proposal for several purposes:
>>
>>  1) Someone claimed to own the package since 2009, but there's no
>> packages at all available on Fedora (weird huh ?); Upstream confirms
>> that they never got any information about this.
>
> This seems like a specific case of weirdness and nothing worth drawing
> general conclusions from. Why not just describe the specific situation
> here and see if it can be resolved instead of phrasing it as if it were
> a single example of a general problem?

BZ718430


>>  2) For newcomers the review process takes way to long... Not long ago
>> a 3 year old request was approved... I have pending reviews for nearly
>> a year...
>
> This can vary hugely; it depends to a large extent on a) how interested
> other people are in your package and b) how hard you try and get someone
> to review it.
>
> For instance, the review for Cinnamon was picked up within days of being
> filed, because of widespread general interest. (It's been held up by
> technical issues, but it was picked up quickly and followed actively).
> If your package is 'plugin for obscure scientific framework that three
> people in the entire world care about', you can expect the review to
> take longer, especially if you make no active efforts to try and find
> someone to review it - by mailing the list, offering review swaps,
> poking people you know within Fedora, pulling in favours etc. If you
> just file a review for anything but a very popular package and leave it
> sitting there, you're relying on one of the few people who consider
> 'going through the pile of packages for review methodically' to be a
> good time.

Yeah, Cinnamon is tricky specially with Muffin typelib provides issue
(typelib(Meta-3.0)). I've withdraw it from openSUSE as well before I
left.

>> For this situation in particular, upstream is providing Fedora/RHEL
>> RPM's through a competitors service, openSUSE Build Service. This is
>> by far not elegant at all :)
>
> OBS now stands for Open Build Service, specifically because SUSE think
> it should be a generic service. Obviously it's not as good as being part
> of the distro, but from all I know about it, it seems like a perfectly
> good second choice. Isn't calling it 'a competitor's service' and
> implying it would somehow be better if there were some Fedora-affiliated
> remote build service and the package used that instead simply an example
> of NIH thinking? If OBS does the job, why should Fedora spend resources
> creating a 'competing' service?

Adam, the main point is that users, upstream and myself believe that
if the package is provided on Fedora it's better for everyone,
specially for end users. Sure if you doin't want to have more packages
on Fedora, then we have a solution already... which eventually is more
complicated for everyone, mainly for end users than a simple: yum
install <PACKAGE>...

But there's no issues what so ever from my side, it's actually less
work for me...


> --
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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-- 
Nelson Marques
// I've stopped trying to understand sandwiches with a third piece of
bread in the middle...