On 09.07.2008 12:51, Panu Matilainen wrote:
At long last, we are about to get a brand new RPM version (alpha snapshot at the moment) into rawhide. The list of changes from 4.4.2.x is massive and a full summary needs a separate posting (will follow as time permits), this is just a heads-up of immediate consequences for Fedora packagers and rawhide consumers:
Sounds great, thanks Panu and others! Much appreciated and looked forward to.
But this announcement made me wondering: We have a big and complicated Feature process [1] in Fedora that keeps a whole lot of people and committees (especially FESCo) busy. Afaics the new RPM version is something that can be considered a "feature" [2]. It was afaics not approved yet by FESCO [3] or even proposed [4]. I would expect going backwards to an older RPM in rawhide later will be next to impossible or very very hard. IOW: once it's in rawhide for a few days FESCO kind of has no other chance then to approve this feature, in case it ever comes up for a Feature vote in a FESCo meeting.
So is the most of the Feature process (and especially FESCo's approval) useless overhead? It looks to me that the answer tends to be "yes" as long as big features like this can easily creep in without going through the established approval process, as long as the feature gets added to rawhide early enough in the devel cycle.
Just wondering. No, I really don't want to stop the new RPM; there are likely other examples (say OpenOffice 3.0) in rawhide (but going backwards there as hard as with RPM). But I'm more and more wondering if the complex Feature process is worth all the trouble and effort. The best thing that came out of it in F9 IMHO were the good release notes and great "whats new" pages. But I'd say we can have that easier.
CU knurd [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy#Definition_of_a_Feature [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:AcceptedFedora10 [4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:ProposedFedora10 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CategoryProposedFeature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
