[Proposal] Ring-based Packaging Policies

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "KF" == Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> writes:

KF> I know in the past the FPC has talked about relaxing the bundling
KF> guidelines, perhaps we could get some of them to weigh in here?

Yeah, we had a big discussion about that a while back, where we sort of
agreed on a basic change of philosophy regarding some cases of bundling,
and an acceptance of reality in others.  Unfortunately this was done
back when the committee was a bit more dysfunctional than it is now, and
I'm not sure it actually got written down.  Which means that I have
digging through a couple of years of meeting logs on my schedule.

And in any case, I'm not sure it would really help in the majority of
cases involved here.  But it might help.  Really the reason we fail to
approve most bundling requests is because nobody bothers to provide us
with the information we ask for.  (Things like some statement of why the
upstreams believe they need to bundle, whether any of the upstreams are
amenable to patches, an assement of whether they actually track changes
to the things they bundle, what kind of changes they make to what they
bundle, etc.)  I think having these is really kind of important to avoid
just shoveling random stuff into random other stuff for reasons which
aren't clear to anyone on our (Fedora's) side, even if we were to
drastically relax the rules.

KF> Additionally, FPC folks have done a great job recently (mostly due
KF> to Tibbs hard work) in catching up with their backlog. Bundling
KF> requests I would think would be much quicker than in the past.

I appreciate the shoutout but James has been doing a ton of work too.

Anyway, I think we're going to do much better with not letting things
fall through the cracks, and to update when things don't get discussed
in a meeting.  However, nothing is going to help the tickets sitting in
needinfo.  We can't track down all of the requested information
ourselves.

KF> Some ideas about the review queue:

Honestly I would really, really like to have a completely separate
discussion about the review queue.  Getting things hung up on bundling
isn't the best way to make easy progress on any of the other issues.

KF> * Get some pool of people interested in being triage for the
KF>   queue. ie, check that things build, run fedora-review on them,
KF>   point submittors to how to get sponsored docs, close old reviews
KF>   with no response, etc.

Easy: Most ofhis stuff needs to be submitted initially.  I would ping
and eventually close any review tickets where the submitter hasn't
provided this information.

And I have done this in the past; it's pretty thankless.  Now that I'm
mostly done cleaning up FPC stuff I might be able to find some time to
garden the review queue, but I certainly wouldn't get in the way of
anyone else wanting to do it.

KF> * Moving reviews out of bugzilla has been proposed and some work I
KF>   think has been done for an app to do that.

Bugzilla is merely a sort-of-convenient place to put reviews and it
provides something we can bodge into a workflow, but I don't think
anyone would complain if it moved somewhere else and if more things were
automated.  I suppose fedora-review itself could also grow a way to
submit a reasonable review to bugzilla if someone hasn't already written
a tool to do that.

 - J<