Proposal for revitalizing the sponsorship process for packaging

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:31:43 +1000, GG (Guido) wrote:

> > That's no new responsibilities. Sponsors have always been expected to do
> > that. With pkgdb, it requires "watch*" access to the packages. Else
> > it requires subscribing to the scm-commits list and filtering by
> > username/packagename. I've done that, and I've been aware of sponsors
> > who have done that, too.
> 
> I wasn't aware of that; if it isn't a best practice, but a must do,
> the wiki page
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_sponsor_responsibilities should
> be updated.

You've found a section in the Wiki that isn't pretty. :-)
There's this other page:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_sponsor_a_new_contributor#Sponsoring_Someone_for_Fedora_Package_Collection

  | You should be sure to review their commits to the Git repository for
  | how they look, and consider watching their Bugzilla activity at least
  | for a while (Account->Email->Users to watch).

> >> More sponsors should bring more control, not easier membership.
> >
> > Too vague. Please expand on that.
> 
> If this page is updated (I have no idea):
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/group/members/packager/*/sponsor?order_by=approval
> the sponsors group has not grown as a function of packages, nor as a
> function of package maintainers. Possibly because of the sponsor is a
> provenpackager thing, possibly because that was meant as "we need X sponsors
> to take care of the Y new maintainers requests we get each given time window".

Rest assured, no such variables X and Y are in use anywhere related to the
packager sponsor group. Potential sponsors either nominate themselves or
get nominated by somebody else:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_sponsor_a_new_contributor

> But I am not saying that a sponsor should be turned to a forced
> comaintainer for the time being, either.

That wouldn't work well in all cases anyway. There is no requirement for
sponsors to have indepth knowledge of the software the sponsoree has
packaged. Not even the first package the sponsor has reviewed. Doing
packaging and reviewing a package is one thing, being intimately familiar
with the packaged software is another. Review-time testing of the packaged
software is only a SHOULD in the guidelines. It is assumed that the
package submitter is familiar with the software and that the reviewer
is sufficiently familiar with packaging to not break the software by
making false recommendations. ;)

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