Michael Schwendt wrote:
On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:17:20 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
Actually the idea of strict ownership evades me, I would rather prefer a
more Wiki-like attitude (once you have a Fedora ID account and PGP key) -
"BE BOLD", "If in doubt, fix it".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold_in_updating_pages
+1 -- I'm all for that, too, but every time I proposed something like
the above somewhere I got quickly shot down by other people.
But the proper place for that IMHO is not the co-maintainers policy.
It's IMHO the "when to touch other peoples packages" policy. When I
wrote that I even tried to grant some "packaging specialists" access
everywhere, but as I said: People did not like it and preferred the
bugzilla way even for obvious fixes.
I'm not sure where I stand here, on one hand, I like the idea of being
able to fix other peoples packages as bugzilla indeed sometimes is a
slow path. OTOH I don't like people touching some of my packages without
me being in the loop somehow. This differs from one package to the
other, some are quite straight forward, others however are not and are
easy to break. Take Ogre for example, a minor update from 1.2.3 to 1.2.4
from upstream might seam harmless there, but upstream tends to break the
ABI every update! Some other maintainer trying to help is likely not to
know this and thus create problems, so I don't want other people
touching Ogre without asking me first.
"Touching your packages" and "upgrading your packages" is not the same.
Why, oh, why are breakage scenarios like that used as a main argument
everytime there is a discussion like this?
Because:
1) I've sponsored several people and in general that meant having to
teach / coach them until they become familiar enough with packaging
issues and guidelines to give them the green light. At that point
most of them still weren't really good packagers, think of them as
just graduated from school and now learning the real stuff in
practice.
2) One of THL's main arguments for this co-maintaining is to allow new
(unexperienced) contributers to get into the game by co maintaining
3) New (unexperienced) contributers are likely to not know the
difference between touching and updating.
That doesn't mean I'm opposed to all this, it just means I'm critical.
I for one wouldn't let a new (unexperienced) contributer, co-maintain
any (delicate) libraries as the chance for breakage is just too high
(IMHO). OTOH I have plenty of simple / small package for which a
co-maintainer would be more then welcome, and in that case to actual
handle things like new upstream versions, fix small packaging bugs etc.
Regards,
Hans
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