Re: Onboarding package

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Vít Ondruch kirjoitti 6.10.2021 klo 10.51:

Dne 06. 10. 21 v 7:35 Otto Urpelainen napsal(a):
Stephen Snow kirjoitti 5.10.2021 klo 15.39:
we were initially discussing that it could be useful to have some
package one can experiment with without being too much worried about
the
result.

However, discussing this back and forth, we figured that it might
also
where new coming package maintainer could gradually gain experience
with
the packaging workflows. So the simplest tasks could be:

1) Add changelog entry into onboarding package and open PR with the
change. This would not require too many privileges. Alternatively
this
current Fedora contributors might be interested to send such PR ;)

I like this approach, but I was also thinking of a small tutorial/app
to actually package a piece of software as required, going through the
various steps but be a "fake" package that is only used to teach and
test with. This app could record the FAS user ID and assign a badge to
it once they complete the tutorial successfully. Sort of a base
starting point for all new packagersd that give both them some
confidence going in and the sponsors some confidence too about the
level of the new committers capabilities.

Well, in the Quick Docs, we already have Creating RPM packages [1]. It has subpage "Publishing your software on Copr", which somehow covers the publishing aspect. But honestly, when I was starting out, I spent some time with those instructions, but could not understand them or complete the tutorials. So one thing would be to revisit these instructions and make the better — there is a task about moving them over to Package Maintainer Docs [2], it was in progress at some point, but apparently stalled now. After that, improvement could happen.

About every packager publishing their own test package, in Copr that can be done for sure. If it is deemed too far from the official Fedora repositories, the perhaps it could be done in staging. I have never really used it, I cannot say if that is a good idea or not.

A similar but different idea I have is to create a "Fedora Packaging Guidelines Web Course" that you can complete by yourself. It could be implemented as a Git repository. For each entry in the the Review Guidelines [3], there would be a directory with a specfile and a srpm. For simplicity, we could first implement cases which fedora-review can check automatically. The student's assignment would be to run fedora-review on the specfile, find the error it gives, refer to the Packaging Guidelines to figure out how to fix it, modify the specfile as needed and run fedora-review again to check their answer. The assignment is completed when fedora-review does not complain any more.

Later, the course could be expanded also to cases where there is no automated check available, either by involving a mentor, or simply by adding a SOLUTION file.

Awarding a badge for completing this course would be a good idea, if a technical solution can be found.

I see this course as complementary to Vít's original proposal about the onboarding package. The orboarding package tasks are about learning the build system, certainly a required skill for packages. The course is about learning the Guidelines. Currently the recommended method to do that is to submit inofficial reviews to live Review Requests. That has the advantage of exposing the applicant to real packages with real problems, but 1) has no guarantee of producing an effective learning path, the package that is picked may well be a very tricky case and thus unsuitable for starting out and 2) is psychologically unsafe, because a total newcomer must participate in discussion of two experts who are actually trying to get a package into Fedora, not educating the packagers.


Just FTR, I like these ideas. Nevertheless, as with every idea, they need to be implemented and maintained. Therefore, from the experience, I think that onboarding package could survive longer, because it (hopefully) needs less maintenance.

It is a valid concern. The onboarding package is just a single package, whereas if the would be N assignments, there would be also N specfiles to maintain as the guidelines change. Starting from the sections that are the least probable to change would help.

Also note that I did not intend to propose to do something like this instead of the onboarding package, which is a good idea. Rather, this could be done in addition to that, and serves a different need.

If there is another way, requiring less maintenance work, that allows learning how to apply the Packaging Guidelines, even better. It is just that the the current method of "just read the Guidelines" is too theoretical, and "comment on live reviews" is too hands-on.

Otto
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