On Thu, 04 Feb 2016 09:09:33 +0800 Ian Kent <raven@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I agree. > > I believe that package ownership has at least a couple of clear > advantages for obvious reasons and I find it hard to understand how > people can discount their usefulness. > > 1) A point of contact and co-ordination for changes is needed. > > Often, when dealing with difficult problems it's necessary to seek > advice from maintainers of other packages. Being able to find out who > that is and having at least some chance they will be familiar with > upstream package status is important. > > 2) Taking (even notional) ownership of a package implies there is at > least some interest in the package from an upstream POV. > > Some (probably many) packages need a packager to take an interest in > what is happening upstream. Building relationships with upstream > maintainers doesn't always work too well but even that is an > important part of knowing what the upstream status of a package is. > > This is essential to be able to provide 1) above, someone who has some > understanding of the upstream status really is needed to at least > help keep our packages as stable as we can. > > It's true that package owners don't always have enough upstream > knowledge of packages they own or relationships with upstream but > that doesn't mean that ownership is a bad thing. After all a point of > contact is still needed IMHO. I agree with what you are saying, but disagree that anything above requires you to "own" packages and guard them from anyone else. You can still be a point of contact and/or interested upstream and want to help keep the packages in Fedora high quality and working, but still be willing to work as part of the entire collection of maintainers not isolated or defensive. We all want to improve things, even if we make mistakes doing so. > > I fail to see how allowing ad-hoc changes to packages, which will > often not even involve letting others interested in the package know > what has happened, will lead to improvement overall. * The change is something cosmetic over vast piles of packages (like the recent note that %defattr is useless) Sure you can clean that up yourself, but if we have an automated way of fixing it, why not let the automation do so? * The issues might be things on some other arch that you don't have access to or care about, so someone interested in making Fedora better on that arch might add a patch or the like. * Some fix or workaround might be needed urgently and you may be unavailable. When you get back you can work on the real fix or whatever, and the things blocked went on in your absense. * Some package your package(s) depend on may have changed and that maintainer wants to rebuild your package against their new one so everything keeps working. However IMHO for all these cases there should be mention on list, directly to maintainers, bugzilla, or be completely obvious. ...snip... kevin
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