Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:59:30 +0200, AL (Alec) wrote:

> Still, besides this sad experience, isn't this the kind of cooperation 
> we should encourage? Now and then those great people with great apps 
> want their app in Fedora. Instead of saying "Wonderful, welcome", we 
> send them a list of an actually quite complicated set of requirements to 
> become a packager. But those people don't  want that, they just want 
> their application packaged. And although they havn't the packaging 
> skills, they know their app. And that's actually a damned good starting 
> point.

Is it?  You want packages that will be well-maintained and will stay
in the distribution for more than half a year.
There have been packages, which have been trivial to review'n'approve
because of the simplicity of their spec files, but that doesn't mean the
packager/maintainer follows Fedora closely enough as necessary to handle
bugzilla/ABRT tickets, rebuilds, updates, bug-fixes, or packaging-fixes
(reported by scripts or for Rawhide). For various reasons. Oh, it's fun
if some breakage seems to be specific to Fedora (or specific to
leading-edge releases), and an upstream maintainer is not interested
in dealing with that. 
Sometimes even Rawhide's daily broken deps report is considered
intimidating. I've answered tons of mails when I generated the extra
broken deps reports for the released dists. And more often than not, the
mails were negative and not positive/curious.

The package review process ensures that the packagers learn
to know what will be necessary to build in a minimum build environment
such as with koji/mock and that there are several packaging mistakes
which lead to increased trouble/maintenance or even unreproducible builds. 
 
> What I'm talking about is  to tell these great people that there are two 
> ways to get their app packaged. One way is to become a packager, and so 
> far this discussion is about that path,. Obviously, the requirements 
> here are beyond knowing an app, though.
> 
> The other way should be to find, persuade  (bribe?) a packager to take 
> care of the package in cooperation with the developer. As I understand 
> it, there is no such path today(?)  I think it's a pity, because the 
> cooperation between a developer and a packager is actually a good way of 
> doing it.

Sure there is!  And that's _two_ people already, who would work on the
package. The theory fails, if there is no volunteer packager to begin
with.

And anyway, how many packages have more than one _active_ maintainer?
It would be fairly easy for interested packagers to become co-maintainers
and become more familiar with Fedora Packaging that way.

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