[ACTION REQUIRED] Retiring packages for F-17

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> Are you trying to say the Fedora Project has made it much too easy for
> them to leave and have their account disabled, too?

I'm saying that it's the ever-increasing bureaucracy which causes us to lose 
maintainers, that's all.

> No, it isn't. Even in the scenario of project-wide write-access to
> packages, there must be someone to decide when to perform an upgrade.

Not if we make it a project-wide policy to upgrade whenever there isn't a 
strong reason not to (as I've been proposing all this time) and encourage 
provenpackagers (or even any packagers) to just upgrade the packages (unless 
the maintainer explicitly left a note in the specfile why it shouldn't be 
upgraded and the reason given actually makes sense), instead of discouraging 
it as we do now.

With that, the policy would be: You think the software is old? You upgrade 
it. Problem solved.

>> and I don't have the time to do it all alone anymore.)
> 
> Which is proof that your entire proposal won't work either.

No, it's not. If we all made it a habit to (and I believe that would be 
WITHIN our CURRENT policies, though a policy change actively encouraging 
this would be helpful) just rebuild packages with broken dependencies as we 
see them, there wouldn't ever be so many that a single person can't handle 
it (and even if there would, it wouldn't be a problem because it would NOT 
be a single person to do it). The problem only starts when it's only me!

> No. We need _more_ packagers, even if that means, many more _newbie
> packagers_. If there is at least one user for package, at least one of
> these users ought to contribute to the packaging.

Easier said than done. Getting people to contribute that way has had very 
limited success, many users are just not interested in packaging (they come 
up with all sorts of excuses when I ask them the usual "You want this 
software in Fedora? Why don't YOU package and maintain it?" question), plus 
we're actually not making it easy at all to start packaging. Not only is 
there the endless bureaucracy which also annoys existing maintainers, but 
the sponsorship (and package review) process can also be a big hurdle. In 
the meantime, we're removing packages people actually need, and making it a 
real PITA to resurrect them. (If I want to pick up a package I missed in one 
of the previous "retiring" announcements, I have to get it through all the 
review process again just as if it had never been in Fedora!)

        Kevin Kofler