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

[Haïkel]

2015-10-09 0:08 GMT+02:00 Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski
<dominik at greysector.net>:
> 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.
>

Thanks for doing that.


> 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.
>

Ack, makes sense.

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

This was discussed, I remember that this very point being raised by rishi.
We agreed (but not voted) that packages with dead upstream should unbundle.

I personally even consider that such packages should just be dropped
in the long-term.

=> I don't think anyone is against strict unbundling for dead upstream package.
Problem is how we detect that a package has a dead upstream :/

> 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.
>

*nods*
If FPC is willing to do that, that's fine with me.

> 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.
>

Yeah, many packages bundle crypto and checksum code, and these needs
to be tracked.

Any wording clarifications should be welcome, but I guess we'll have
to review this topic during fesco meeting again.

Regards,
H.


> Regards,
> Dominik
> --
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