Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nelson Marques" <nmo.marques at gmail.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2012 2:18:50 PM
> Subject: Re: Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging
> 
> No dia 26 de Abril de 2012 01:08, Stephen Gallagher
> <sgallagh at redhat.com> escreveu:
> > On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 22:43 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> >>
> >> Why not just drop the sponsorship process and just raise the
> >> barrier of
> >> entry for the packaging process instead?
> >>
> >> Like having to have been a comaintainer for atleast one release
> >> cycle
> >> then completed x many reviews in the next etc. ( essentally what
> >> you
> >> propose there just without the "sponsor" ) and finally you are
> >> maintaining your own package or if we drop that outdated ownership
> >> model
> >> we have in place are free to roam "free" in the packaging
> >> community and
> >> assist when ever, where ever possible...
> >
> > This approach completely disregards the very common example of "I'm
> > an
> > upstream maintainer of a cool project. I want to package and
> > maintain it
> > for Fedora." Under your approach, they'd first have to become
> > involved
> > in other projects before being allowed to add their package. This
> > is
> > unacceptable and would basically guarantee that no upstream would
> > willingly involve itself with Fedora.
> 
> 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.
>  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...
> 
> 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 :)
> 
> The review process needs to be faster... And I go further... On my
> dayjob we mirror a lot of stuff from EPEL which is mainly the only
> repository we have trust with. We have people available to maintain
> other packages on EPEL, and some of my colleagues are even part of
> upstream in many cases (perl modules, java stuff, etc)... But we
> can't
> contribute to EPEL for example with reviews that take countless time.
> Currently we're preparing yet another public repository with our own
> packaging and enhancements because reviews take a huge ammount of
> time... Though this contributions would be mainly aimed to EPEL which
> is what we use.

Well, if you are at least 2 guys you can do reviews for each other and the speed of the review will depend on you two only. I can ensure you that a number of people act this way. Find a number of people having similar interests as you and help each other to speed up the thing.

Alex

> 
> I find hard to become a packager for Fedora specially when there's
> already background experience with another vendor.
> 
> NM
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