Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-10-07)

Thu Oct 8 22:08:36 UTC 2015

On Wednesday, 07 October 2015 at 21:17, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> Meeting summary
> ---------------
[...]
> * #1483 Decision on bundling policy in the Fedora Package Collection
>   (sgallagh, 18:11:40)
>   * LINK: http://paste.fedoraproject.org/276064/44243383/ is sgallaghs
>     proposal without the critpath distinction  (nirik, 18:43:49)
>   * AGREED: Adjust the packaging policy as described in
>     http://paste.fedoraproject.org/276064/44243383/ (+5, 3, -1)
>     (sgallagh, 18:57:44)
>   * ACTION: tibbs|w to inform FPC and work on removing the anti-bundling
>     stuff from the guidelines  (sgallagh, 18:59:17)

This was handled far too quickly and without considering the full
consequences of the change that was passed. Also, the way you handled
this caused a lot of resentment among the FPC members (or at least
that's the impression I have). Now, personal feelings aside, I do have
some technical points to make, with my FPC hat on.

The new wording completely drops the requirement for package maintainers
to at least attempt unbundling on their own if upstream doesn't want to
support it. In many cases, it's quite trivial and should be required,
especially if upstream has a testsuite and it passes with downstream
unbundling.

You completely ignored the case when upstream is dead and cannot be
contacted (and, for example the upstream of the bundled code is not).

Additionally, there's no requirement to maintain sanity in the bundled
Provides: naming. You should have at least mandated that the maintainer
checks existing packaged and/or bundled package names and uses the same
name if the code is bundled in a new package. FPC or at least the
packaging list should be consulted in case of any doubts here. We have
considerable experience in this area and we (used to) maintain a canonical
list of bundled(foo) provides. I believe it makes sense that we keep
doing it.

Finally, the wording speaks about libraries, completely ignoring the
fact that very often, only single files or even code snippets are
bundled and these need to be tracked as well. You haven't defined
what a "library" is.

Regards,
Dominik
-- 
Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Rathann
RPMFusion http://rpmfusion.org
"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"