On 13 July 2015 at 03:54, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 11 July 2015 at 16:09, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 11:45:13 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > >>> and I will probably also find that those >>> packages have 'accepted' differentiation because no one wants to get >>> into a political fight over XYZ package ever again. >> >> And how would you like to fix that? By making packaging guidelines >> more lax? By removing the review process, so _every_ packager may >> decide whether not to adhere to the guidelines? >> > > Wow do you have any more words you want to stuff in my mouth that I > supposedly want? Thank you for reminding me why I don't want anything > to do with packaging anymore. Hopefully I can change your mind on that front, as the package review process is something I'm deeply interested in helping to improve. I consider enabling more effective collaboration between upstream communities and the Fedora community to be an essential part of the role of the Environments & Stacks Working Group, and the package review process is a core element of that. This *doesn't* mean relaxing any of the core packaging policy requirements - those exist for a reason. Rather, it means providing a smoother onramp for the packaging process, where potential packagers are able to make incremental progress, largely facilitated by automated systems, such that by the time potential packagers are seeking sponsors for inclusion in the main Fedora repositories, they'll already have a much clearer idea of what a "good" package looks like, and how the packaging guidelines serve to protect the interests of Fedora's end users by imposing additional requirements on Fedora's contributors. A few of the key barriers to entry that currently exist: 1. The package review process is currently a manual mixture of command line tools, wiki pages, Bugzilla issues, and more. It's incredibly hard for newcomers to figure out where to get started, how to move things along to the next stage, how to run automated scans on their own packages, etc. Google doesn't help unless you already know which documentation is authoritative and which is a historical relic. 2. Humans don't like other humans being pedantic, but we expect it from computers. We'll instinctively argue with other people to try to get out of doing work if we think their requirements are unreasonable, but we know computers can't be reasoned with. As a result, if an automated scan is complaining, we're more likely to just fix the problem to make it be quiet than we are if another person were to point out the same problem (especially if making the automated scan happy is a prerequisite for getting attention from a human). 3. Package review is currently an all or nothing process. Even with COPR, a "staging package" that is in principle acceptable for inclusion in the main Fedora process but doesn't yet meet package policy guidelines isn't any easier to discover or install than a project that hasn't been packaged at all. This last problem then makes it difficult for groups of people to effectively *collaborate* on getting a package to a point where it's not only acceptable for inclusion in the main distribution, but also has multiple potential maintainers rather than relying specifically on the one package maintainer who pushed it through the review process. I think the Fresque developers have the right idea in wanting to create a dedicated Fedora Review Server. Moving package reviews out of Bugzilla provides an opportunity to create a more integrated review experience that can potentially bring in automated server side execution of tools like rpmlint and rpmgrill against COPR repos before human reviewers even need to get involved at all. That way potential packagers wouldn't be left in limbo waiting for potential sponsors to provide feedback, and potential sponsors would be able to focus their attention on potential packagers that have already demonstrated their willingness to meet at least the essential standards set by the automated scans. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@xxxxxxxxx | Brisbane, Australia -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
