Re: Ideas for better development processes when maintaining hundreds of packages

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On Wed, 29 Jan 2020 at 09:46, Damian Ivanov <damianatorrpm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >That is looking for a boogeyman under the bed to blame something that
> >has a long long history of not happening. Ever since OBS has been out,
> >there has been a yearly 'why isn't Fedora moving to OBS' thread
>
> It has always been a bad management decision to not change.
> Ever since OBS has been out there has been a regular thread about this
> (usually not started by me), because it's the correct thing to do in
> a long term perspective for RH and the Linux community/ecosystem.
>

I think you are conflating management and leadership and assuming that
they have ever been 1:1 in Fedora or Red Hat.  For the most part
managers are people who push paperwork, attend meetings and do
whatever it is to allow the developers do what they feel is needed to
get an OS out the door. They also are used as a convenient fall-guy
when a developer doesn't really want to do something by saying
management decided something. [There have been many a time the manager
finds out about the decision at the same as the people being told a
decision was made.]

In the end, stuff gets done by leader's who commit to doing the lion's
share of the work. Sometimes it is a manager, but mostly it is by
various developers or maintainers who go ahead and make something
happen either by skunk-works or putting in enough that it is done. The
fact that OBS has not been chosen is more about no one wanting to do
all the hardwork to make it happen versus management saying 'its from
SuSE so we can't use it.'  The way things have worked instead is that
someone will say 'I want to show that this can be done with X' and
they will go and do a lot of the work to make that happen.
Mandrake(Mandriva? Mageia?) was started as  someone wanting Red Hat
Linux rebuilt with various Pentium+ flags versus i386. They also
wanted to show other things that the Red Hat Linux developers were not
comfortable with. Eventually that hard work was what got Red Hat Linux
to start adding in Pentium+ items and other things. The same with
various desktops.. in no case was it management saying 'dont do that'
it was developers saying 'I have enough work already and this isn't
going to make it less.' until it was less. OBS is fighting the 'Devil
I know versus the devil I don't know' with every Fedora developer who
knows fedpkg and the current tools. They may hate those tools, but
they know they work AND they know that maintenance and keeping them
working is somebody else's problem.

If people want to set up an OBS build system, they need to become the
people who that it is 'somebody else's problem' . They need to set up
a buildsystem, build the OS, document how it works and be pretty
honest about what doesn't. Then they will either get the old packagers
to try it out or a bunch of new ones to take up the burden.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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