Jerry James wrote: > 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. Looking at: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/view/jjames https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jjames I see no IRC contact info at all. And you're surprised that people did not try to contact you? Really, it is not realistic to expect people who need to urgently fix something to write up a polite e-mail and wait possibly days for you to reply (especially if you then answer that you don't want the change and more days are wasted going back and forth arguing for why the change is needed). Either you are reachable quickly through real-time communication (which effectively means IRC in the Free Software world) or you will just not be asked. I always curse when I try to contact a packager and see either no IRC contact info, or an IRC nick that is clearly not in active use (last seen weeks ago). > 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. Patch comments are also overrated. Often, the patch name already clearly says what the patch does. (E.g., guess what kdelibs-3.5.10-CVE-2015-7543.patch is for. :-) That said, I always try to add at least 1 line of comments for patches, even in my own packages; the particular patch I cited here actually has a 4-line comment.) Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
