Dealing with the "my packages" problem

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2015-11-18 at 10:04 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 06:08:24PM -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> > After some IRC discussion I've come to the following proposal: that
> > maintainers have some way to easily indicate how open they are to
> > external contributions.  Basically this would take the form of a few
> > options in pkgdb where maintainers can indicate their willingness to
> > have provenpackagers carry out a few actions.  Please read the github
> > ticket for details:
> >   https://github.com/fedora-infra/pkgdb2/issues/274
> 
> What if we made the options be about _the package_ rather than about
> the maintainer's prickliness? Rather than "Please don't touch my
> package" (I know that's not your wording; added for emphasis) make it
> "This package has unusual complications; please coordinate any changes
> with the package maintainers."
> 
> Well, except, less wordy. :)
> 
> And, in thinking about it, I don't think we should encourage the
> option of "Don't even ask". If there really _is_ something that's a big
> deal, the package maintainer can always say no when asked.

Just as a general note on this thread: if you're a packager and you
have a genuine reason why people should be careful about touching your
package, or follow some specific process when doing so, or there's
something that people might think they should change but they
shouldn't, there is already a pretty effective way of dealing with
this:

** PUT A COMMENT IN THE SPEC FILE **

this is extremely easy to do, and extremely difficult for anyone who
touches it to claim they didn't see.

Package builds in a community distro are really just like F/OSS code:
you should assume other people are going to be looking at it and poking
it and trying to do stuff with it, and any time it's doing something
that isn't extremely obvious or diverges from the general conventions,
it makes sense to comment it.

A common example is cases where the Fedora spec is generated as part of
some other workflow, and downstream direct edits to the spec screw that
up: this is a thing that happens, but it isn't the general convention
with Fedora, and you can't really just expect people to magically know
about it. If your spec is like this, put a comment in the spec file so
anyone who goes to poke it knows about the workflow.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net