Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Nelson Marques]

No dia 26 de Abril de 2012 19:49, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> escreveu:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 12:58:59PM +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:
>> 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
>>
> So reading that with the meat seeming to come from here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=757352#c5
>
> it looks like Simon has been working on packaging what you were working on
> but hadn't gotten to submitting it for review yet (because he found problems
> with licensing that needed to be resolved).  I don't read what he said in
> his comment as saying that he did not want you to work on your package....

Toshio... a few things:

 1) Upstream from UH fixed the licenses a long time ago, it wasn't
really a show stopper when I submitted the request. Furthermore, for
openSUSE submission I got other issues, such as they were reluctant in
accepting guichan on Factory since it hasn't been maintained for 2
years. Upstream UH offered themselves to maintain guichan.

 2) Chris Mueller, one of the main developers of UH on behalf of the
UH Team stated clearly that UH Team was never contacted regarding
those issues, else they would be available to fix them. He asked me if
I could maintain it for Fedora (in-distro) since Fedora users were
asking for it that way. Fedora has quite some expression in Germany
and in Europe, and like I've defended before, even that Fedora isn't
aimed for traditional end users it has a very strong image in the
Linux world and users use it :)

 3) What I've learned on openSUSE was that potential packagers should
investigate is there's previous work on the package we want to
maintain and respect it. That's what I did, he claimed to be working
on it, I've backed down. Furthermore, I do maintain Fedora/RHEL
packages on OBS for upstream which actually exist. I've tried to step
up to easen up for everyone, it didn't worked out.

Did I proceeded wrong ?

>
> Now... here's what I think the current process is supposed to look like.
> Simon's replied to the Fife bug saying that he's done some work on trying to
> package UH but maybe doesn't realize that you've already got an attempt at
> packaging it under review.  Next comment from you could be:

A small thing... Please search for Unknown Horizons on BZ... How was I
supposed to know people were working on it ? As far as I can see, my
request was the first to land, right ?

> Hey Simon, I have also attempted packaging for UH and have a review request
> open for it here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=718430 We've
> resolved some of the licensing concerns already but I'm not sure if we found
> and addressed the one that you're pointing out.  I'm not a packager yet but
> I'd like to be.  Would you be willing to review my package and give feedback
> on your current work?  If you're a sponsor or would be willing to mentor me as
> a comaintainer of the UH package once it passes review then we could get
> a lot more done between the two of us.  Thanks!

Toshio, he tried, I've actually done it and my packages are being used
by upstream. See how cool upstream is... even if I don't follow the
project closely I get on my email all the critical fixes required...
It's really a waste when we have such a cool upstream and things don't
happen.

Simon can pretty much use my previous work or my current work on OBS.
If he wants I don't mind if he maintains it for Fedora and I maintain
on EPEL (I've actually far more interested on EPEL than Fedora since I
actually use RHEL on two of my machines).

All my current work is available here:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=unknown-horizons&project=games%3Aunknown-horizons

Like Adam said before, it's a cool second option and offers far more
liberty regarding licensing and friends, nevertheless I've tried to
use all the information and knowledge I had from Tom's review and
openSUSE to make the best packages possible to the best of my
knowledge.

> So the big question is -- where did this break down?  How can we update our
> documentation to guide people in this direction?
>
> -Toshio
>
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-- 
Nelson Marques
// I've stopped trying to understand sandwiches with a third piece of
bread in the middle...