On 1/8/07, Patrice Dumas <pertusus@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Indeed, but it is better, in my opinion, to do that through education of packagers and collective control from those who cares, rather than through another set of rules.
Untarnished idealism is nice, and I applaud your identification of packager education and collective negotiation of interests as central issues in the growing contributor space. But.... there are practical considerations concerning how release engineering is done so we do this in a timely an orderly manner. There absolutely needs to be brief periods of time when the tree is frozen and gatekeepers are in place, to act as a safety valve against human action that is out-of-sync with the freeze process. To re-cast this in terms of brick-and-mortar issues, there is a very common concept in industrial safety call "Lock-out/Tag-out." When potentially hazardous equipment is undergoing service that impacts the safe operation of other pieces of equipment, the whole chain of equipment which is affected is locked and tagged so that normal operation is absolutely not possible and people are aware as to why the equipment is out of service by reading the tag. You can have mountains of trust in the equipment operators , and you can put them into meetings for hours and hours telling them not to operate the equipment on a certain day...but if you don't lock it out and physically prevent them from operating it... it will be a big problem, a problem that's not worth the risk, even if your employees feel slighted about not being trusted to that extent. That is exactly what a build system freeze with a group of gatekeepers is for a Fedora Release.. its a lock-out/tag-out process to make sure things we don't accidentally break pieces of a larger system through normal operation actions. It's not personal... its sound management. It doesn't matter if the actions are malicious or not, there doesn't need to be malicious intent for a mistake. Its much easier in the long run to train people to respect lock-out/tag-out when it needs to happen than it is to try to find ways to avoid locking people out to make people feel better about their personal control issues. -jef"wtf am I doing, quoting integrated line safety management concepts to code developers"spaleta -- Fedora-maintainers mailing list Fedora-maintainers@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers -- Fedora-maintainers-readonly mailing list Fedora-maintainers-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers-readonly
