Reason why non-commiters are not allowed to create buildroot overrides?

[Susi Lehtola]

On 03/15/2015 08:35 AM, Sandro Mani wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just wondering, is there a particular reason why non-commiters are not
> allowed to create buildroot overrides for a package?
>
> Reason for asking: I've got a package (openambit) which installs a file to
>
> Konsole output
> %{_libdir}/wireshark/plugins/%{wireshark_ver}/ambit.so
>
> This means, for every version change of wireshark, I need to adjust
> %{wireshark_ver} and rebuild.
>
> At present, stable and branched releases, to avoid broken dependencies
> in the time window wireshark and then openambit are pushed to stable,
> I'd need to nag the wireshark maintainer every time to create a
> buildroot override, or ask for commit access to wireshark. I suppose I
> should do the latter, but yeah, just wondering if there is a reason
> against allowing people to create buildroot overrides directly.

With a similar rationale you could argue that one should be able to 
commit changes to packages without any special commit rights.

The reason why buildroot overrides can't be made by anyone is that the 
maintainer might not want people to build packages against the new 
version, if for example it breaks things.

Here the situation is obviously somewhat different. If updating 
wireshark breaks openambit, then
  a) wireshark shouldn't have version updates in stable releases per the
     Fedora Updates Policy
  b) if the updates are warranted, wireshark and openambit should be
     updated in unison by the wireshark maintainer
-- 
Susi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org