[Fedora-packaging] Fedora Packaging Committee Meeting (Tuesday July 22)

[Anthony Green]

Jason Tibbitts wrote:
> Anthony Green wrote:
>> I think that if a package reviewer doesn't know what a REPL is, then 
>> they aren't qualified to review a Common Lisp implementation package 
>> (although Lisp libraries should be easily reviewable without any Lisp 
>> domain knowledge).
>
> Wow, really?  I guess that in that case all I can do is wish you luck 
> in getting any packages reviewed at all.
Remember that I'm making a distinction between Lisp implementations and 
Lisp libraries.  The Common Lisp situation is similar to that of Java, 
in that there are multiple implementations of the language runtime, and 
many library packages that are designed to work with any of the 
implementations.   Fedora's Java packaging guidelines only cover java 
libraries, and ignore the implementation side.  I think that packaging a 
Java implementation, much like packaging a Lisp implementation, requires 
a certain amount of specialized domain knowledge.  That's probably why 
it was omitted from the Java packaging guidelines.

> Well, that and that I'm inclined to vote against guidelines which 
> don't explain things sufficiently so that the available reviewer pool 
> is capable of understanding them.
I could simply drop the Lisp implementation packaging guidelines from my 
draft (to mirror our Java guidelines), but I'd rather not since what I 
have is better than nothing.  All of the major FOSS Common Lisp 
implementations are already in Fedora, so it's not like we'll need many 
reviewers with the rudimentary Lisp knowledge necessary to deal with them.

AG