[Fedora-packaging] Other people modifying specfiles...

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Quoting Darryl L. Pierce (2012-08-20 14:45:31)
> I've a question/issue.
> 
> This morning I came into work to find that one of my packages had been
> updated by someone other than myself or anybody on my team. Several
> changes were made on two branches (F18 and master) without the person so
> much as notifying me in advance or even asking me if it was okay.
> 
> What is the proper way of handling this? I would much prefer that even
> proven packagers just taking it upon themselves to update packages
> without at least having the courtesy of notifying the package maintainer
> first.
> 
> Not a territorial thing, but I would like to at least have some notice
> before someone is going to arbitrarily change a package for which I'm
> responsible.

I have to admit that I use my provenpackager "powers" like this from
time to time (i.e. commit in other people's packages without
emailing them beforehand/bugreport). 

However in my defence this is mostly due to:
 * Good nature of our Java ecosystem maintainers who actually like that
   I help out from time to time even on their packages
 * Me fixing packaging bugs or updating spec files to latest guidelines.

I've never had a problem with this and I am aware of some people trying
to keep their spec files in sync with EPEL (even though I don't
necessarily agree) so I take that into account when doing modifications.

If it was me, I'd prefer a private "warning" email first so I could
explain myself before having to defend my changes in front of whole
devel@ :-)

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com