I recently filed https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1499 with the goal of making the process just a bit simpler for new packagers. The text of my proposal follows. Please make sure that substantial comments are made on the ticket to ensure that FESCo sees them. ----- tl;dr: Relax the requirement that sponsors be directly involved in the package review process. Sponsors are responsible (but not solely responsible) for shepherding people through the packaging process. They should know how to do reviews, but there is nothing so special about a packager's first review that it cannot be handled by the regular packager community. We trust packagers to do every other package review, after all. We also allow new packagers to be sponsored without actually going through the package review process at all via the comaintainer process so what we appear to be emphasizing is that someone is there to assist and monitor the new contributor and not that the contributor make it through the arduous process of a package review with a highly restricted pool of reviewers. Proposal: Decouple sponsorship from the review process. Allow the community to do reviews as normal. Remove the requirement that the first review be done by a sponsor. Emphasize that sponsors can sponsor anyone separate from the review process. They can sponsor them before the review has been done, after it has been done, in the middle of the process, whatever. (This is all currently true in any case, but the process documents link most everything to the completion of a review.) Notes: Obviously sponsorship should still be tied to package maintenance in some way; sponsoring someone without any intention of having them work on a package in some way is pointless. Note that I do not intend to imply that sponsors need not know how to do proper package reviews. The guidelines for becoming a sponsor currently and should continue to specify that having done some package reviews is important to the process. The same goes for actually maintaining packages. Sponsors should know both the mechanics of maintaining packages and the standards for package quality. Hopefully this will open up the actual reviewing to the community as a whole, eliminating one bottleneck. We could potentially end up with people who have completed package reviews but who cannot yet actually import their packages. This would be worse than having people waiting in the sponsorship queue, because they actually did more work and someone from the community actually did some work as well. This could be mitigated through vigilance coupled with some scripting, or additional process in the packager-sponsor trac for requests that happen to fall through the cracks. Searching bugzilla for NEEDSPONSOR tickets still open with fedora-review+ set should be a reasonable first-pass report for those waiting. Mailing a filtered version of that to the sponsors would probably be effective but annoying. - J< -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
