On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 8:17 PM Ben Rosser <rosser.bjr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 1:59 PM Pierre-Yves Chibon <pingou@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > There are regularly people complaining on this very list about how hard > > packaging has become. So here is a thread trying to see if you can come up with > > a long term, ideal, vision of what the packager workflow should be so we can > > work towards it. > > I'm such a person. I tried to put together an Objective on this topic > back in January before realizing I didn't have enough time to drive it > forwards due to real life commitments. > > I may not have said it explicitly in my other replies on the thread, > but I _am_ glad to see people thinking seriously about ways to improve > the packager experience. So I appreciate your proposal, even if I > disagree with the proposed pull request workflow. > > That being said... > > > I'm going to ask again what was in my original email: What is your ideal > > workflow? How do you think things should work? > > Is what we have today the ideal state of things? > > If so, great! > > If not, what can we improve and are there things we can easily change that will > > make it easier for a majority of packagers? > > My feeling is that you've focused on the wrong part of the workflow. > My feeling is that the basic "commit, push, build, repeat" part of > packaging works reasonably well for most packages. Sure, it isn't > perfect, and it can be tedious to keep branches up to date across many > packages, and it'd be nice if there was more continuous integration > and running of a tests. > > But as a packager, the things that frustrate _me_-- the things I was > proposing to help fix, before I realized tha are all the peripherals: > the bits of the infrastructure that don't feel like they interact as > well with the workflow as they could. At the moment, two of my biggest > complaints are: Whoops, I meant to write here: "things I was proposing to help fix, before I realized that I didn't have the time" > > 1. Creating new packages has become (more of) a pain since the > retirement of pkgdb2. I know I keep complaining about needing to > manually fetch Pagure API keys, but it is actually extremely annoying > when I go to request a repo and realize I need to first request a new > API key before doing anything else. The problem isn't the workflow, > per se, but the infrastructure: reviews could really use a better > platform than bugzilla. If reviews were more integrated into the > tooling, automatic checks like fedora-review could maybe be ran > automatically. Maybe approving a new package could even automatically > create the repository, without the requestor having to do anything! > > 2. Release monitoring is a wonderful tool, but it's poorly integrated > with the rest of the project. As a packager maintaining probably more > packages than I should, getting release monitoring notifications to > tell me to pay attention to a particular package is incredibly useful. > But I feel like we could do more with the information. There are > nodejs packages out there, to take an ecosystem at random, that have > had open tickets created by release monitoring for four+ years, and > the only activity on those tickets is the release monitoring bot > detecting new versions. Eventually, maybe, a human comes across the > package and realizes it might be unmaintained, and proceeds with the > nonresponsive maintainer policy or manages to track down the > maintainer to find out why the package hasn't been updated. I don't > say this to criticize anyone in particular, but surely we could be > more proactive here? > > Basically, I don't think we really need an entirely new packaging > workflow. (I would argue that attempts to impose an entirely new > packaging workflow-- like modularity-- are one of the reasons > packaging has gotten harder recently...). We need to improve the > contributor-facing _infrastructure_ to make the current workflow > better. > > I would personally advocate starting with a serious look at the review > process, and the tooling around it. If for no other reason than it is > the first thing most new contributors will interact with, so perhaps > it is in our interest to make it as pleasant as possible. > > Ben Rosser _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
