rawhide/F17 broken dependencies: please stop spamming

[Kevin Kofler]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> Note that there already is a grace period. The policy used to be that a
> review was needed after a package was orphaned.

No. The policy used to be that a review was needed if the package was 1. 
orphaned AND 2. not updated for 3 months. And there was basically no 
enforcement of that policy because there was pretty much no way to enforce 
it (for packages which were not retired yet), which is why it got changed. 
(For already retired packages, you had to prove the 3 months rule to get it 
unretired without a rereview, which was applicable only in rare exceptional 
cases.)

> Note that the people involved here had over a month to deal with this and
> didn't. Packagers are expected to read the devel list and they should
> have noticed that their packages were going to be affected well in
> advance of the deadline.

Half of the distro was affected by the indiscriminate mass orphaning done 
this time. There was no way to know which packages would still have been 
affected at the end.

And packagers of dependent packages weren't directly notified of the 
impending retiring. Reading devel is not (and should not be) a requirement 
(only devel-announce is).

In all the previous mass-retiring rounds, the process was executed as 
follows:
1. The orphaned packages NO other package in the distro depends on were 
retired.
2. For the others, the maintainer of the dependent package was directly 
contacted (in a personal mail discussing only the exact situation affecting 
him/her) and asked whether to pick up the dependency or retire his/her 
package.
3. The packages which didn't get picked up in 2. were retired.
I don't see at all why it hasn't been done that way this time. (Maybe 
because there were too many affected packages to e-mail everyone personally? 
If so, that's yet another sign that this retiring round was way too 
destructive and that we need to be a lot less aggressive in dropping 
packages!)

> Do a new review shouldn't really be all that burdensome unless they find
> something signicant broken. There are two people involved so that don't
> have to find an outside person who has time to do the review.

It's all a waste of everyone's time when it'd just take one person to 
apologize for the miscommunication and click on one f***ing button.

Policies are made to serve humans. Unfortunately, here in Fedora, I get the 
opposite impression! :-(

        Kevin Kofler