On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 11:30 PM, Pierre-Yves Chibon <pingou@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well, one thing about this is that no-one owns packages anymore. We are a > community and there are package maintainers in that community. > Each package has one or more maintainers, but nobody owns it. The only reason we > even have a point of contact is because of bugzilla that requires a single > account to assign the bug reports to. > > So sorry but you do not own your packages, you maintain them and where you are > the point of contact, you are merely the primary recipient of the bug reports :) Several people have said something similar lately, and it worries me. I understand that we're trying to combat the hostility some packagers show when somebody does something to "their" packages, but I'm concerned that we may have swung the pendulum too far the other way. I foresee two problems: 1. Demotivating packagers I know a number of companies have experimented with "ownership-free" models of code development, but they are able to offer incentives that Fedora cannot offer, such as money and kudos offered in front of coworkers. What motivates volunteer packagers to do what they do? I'd like to hear from a few packagers on this topic. What motivates me is pride in my work, and recognition of that good work by others. If I'm just one packager in a big cloud of packagers, and none of us is really responsible for anything ... well, that's quite demotivating. I am the primary point of contact for a few dozen packages where I have done all of the packaging work, all of the reporting of bugs upstream, all of the arguing with upstream to do something about sticky license situations, all of the handling of bug reports. I'm sure the same is true for many other packagers. People feel ownership of what they work on. This is human nature. I fear that by denying human nature with this "those aren't your packages" mantra, we will suck the joy out of packaging work and see packagers less willing to do that work. 2. Motivating responsibility-free drive-by modifications If nobody owns any packages, then who is responsible for fixing package problems? I think the reason some packagers react with hostility to others changing "their" packages is that we have a handful of provenpackagers who make incorrect changes to packages and then walk away, without sticking around to fix the problems they caused with their incorrect changes. I've got two recent examples of this. I won't use any names, because my purpose is not to point fingers. a. Last fall, a provenpackager updated a package for which I am the primary point of contact (as well as the original submitter). The update was to an upstream alpha release. It was alpha for a reason. The release is super buggy. I had not updated to it on purpose. A provenpackager strolled by, updated to the buggy release, then strolled away. Guess who has been getting the bug reports? Not the person who did the update, the person who did not even bother contacting the primary point of contact to see if updating was okay. b. Just last week, another provenpackager dropped two patches into a package for which I am the primary point of contact (as well, again, as the original submitter). One patch only has effect on non-Linux systems, so adding it was pointless. I don't even have any idea what the other patch does. It changes stuff, I can see that, but why? The person who did this did not add any comments to the PatchN: lines in the spec file, so I don't know if they have been submitted upstream, are from upstream, or what. Here, again, the provenpackager made *no* attempt at all to contact the primary point of contact. If I send these two provenpackagers a somewhat hostile email, are you going to blame me? I have no problem with most provenpackager changes. In general, they have an obvious purpose and save me the work of making the same change myself. But changes like the ones above make more work for me, work that could have been avoided if the provenpackager in question had just bothered to make some attempt, any attempt, to contact me first. I think we need to ask ourselves, as a project, what behaviors we want to motivate and what behaviors we want to demotivate in our packagers. I think we need to take human nature, flawed as it is, into account when doing so. I fear that this "nobody owns any packages" mantra is not providing the motivations and demotivations that we really want. -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
