amending the new package process

[Kevin Kofler]

Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> My experience with the new package process is that the review process in
> Step 6 doesn't work. For some of my packages it took 3 months for a
> reviewer to appear, some others more, some where reviewed faster. My
> understanding is that it depends on how interesting the package is, how
> many packagers you know, or whether you enter the review swap market.

Indeed, the review process is the main roadblock to getting things done in 
Fedora.


IMHO, one easy solution to alleviate the problem would be to let experienced 
packagers (ones that are provenpackagers and/or packager sponsors) import 
their packages without a review (or with a self-review). We already trust 
these packagers to know what they're doing, and in particular, to know the 
packaging guidelines. So they should be perfectly able to verify the 
compliance of their own packages on their own. Doing this would clear a 
significant portion of the review queue instantly, and free up valuable 
reviewer time for those packages that really do need reviewing, those coming 
from new packagers.

In many Free Software projects (e.g., GCC, KDE, etc.), the people who are 
allowed to approve other people's commits can also approve their own. Sure, 
there are others that insist (like us) on peer review by a second person, 
but those typically suffer from the same issue we do (stalled reviews all 
over the place).

        Kevin Kofler