On 4/28/06, Chris Ricker <kaboom@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you're still adding new packages to maintenance mode branches, what makes them different from non-maintenance mode? Packagers who want to build new stuff for maintenance branches should do it outside the Fedora build infrastructure -- the whole point of maintenance mode is to reduce the amount of infrastructure work needed to keep Fedora going to something manageable with the amount of resources Fedora has. People who want new packages should upgrade. Maintenance mode is there only as a security / bugfix only courtesy for those who can't upgrade. We want to encourage upgrading as much as possible, however
Perhaps as an additional courtesy there can be scratch areas setup for the releases in maintenance mode inside the buildsys for people to run private builds of 'new' packages which they then publish somewhere else. The idea being allow people to use the extras infrastructure to hold the specs and do the binary builds.. just don't publish these new packages as part of extras. While i personally like the idea of making a maintenance mode devoid of large version shifts as updates, i think it will be impossible to effectively enforce as a policy. Unless there is an additional mechanism put in place to review pending changes for appropriateness (something i don't think we have the manpower to even attempt), 'discouraging people from doing it' is unimplementable beyond more than a meme to be repeated in discussion so there really isn't anything to be up in arms about. To take the edge of the issue I would suggest any statement which gets encoded as guidance to maintainers read like this: 'When working with FE releases which have entered maintainence mode, we(FESCO) would encourage you to focus your time on using patches for security or severe crash issues when choosing to push updates to your packages. If you find you are in a situation where you are considering pushing a new upstream version release as an update for a maintainence release, please jump onto the fedora-extras-list(or maybe fedora-maintainers-list) and start a discussion on the situation. We(FESCO) would like to see discussion to track how often these situations occur and to understand if there are general trends which can be addressed through policy or infrastructure changes in the future." -jef"volunteerism is not about doing whatever you want with the access to the tools the managing organization grants you access to. Volunteerism is about purposed action, within a set of guidelines that you as a volunteer agree to. Organizations which do not provide strong guidance aimed at focusing the available resources, like manhours, on the important pre-defined goals(goals volunteers agree to work towards but have no say in setting those goals) fail in a much more spectacular manner than organizations which are consistently understaffed. Under-staffed organizations with a clear purpose continue to function and adjust the scale of their operations accordingly. Organizations that have a lot of 'members' but no way to manage how 'members' time is spent languish in a state where nothing gets done. I am personally less concerned about Extras loosing some maintainers over policy restrictions, than I am about better defining the focus to aid in long term resource management"spaleta -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
