I recently filed https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1499 with the goal of making the process just a bit simpler for new packagers. The text of my proposal follows. Please make sure that substantial comments are made on the ticket to ensure that FESCo sees them.
----- tl;dr: Relax the requirement that sponsors be directly involved in the package review process.
Sponsors are responsible (but not solely responsible) for shepherding people through the packaging process. They should know how to do reviews, but there is nothing so special about a packager's first review that it cannot be handled by the regular packager community. We trust packagers to do every other package review, after all. We also allow new packagers to be sponsored without actually going through the package review process at all via the comaintainer process so what we appear to be emphasizing is that someone is there to assist and monitor the new contributor and not that the contributor make it through the arduous process of a package review with a highly restricted pool of reviewers.
Proposal: Decouple sponsorship from the review process.
Allow the community to do reviews as normal. Remove the requirement that the first review be done by a sponsor.
Emphasize that sponsors can sponsor anyone separate from the review process. They can sponsor them before the review has been done, after it has been done, in the middle of the process, whatever. (This is all currently true in any case, but the process documents link most everything to the completion of a review.)
Notes: Obviously sponsorship should still be tied to package maintenance in some way; sponsoring someone without any intention of having them work on a package in some way is pointless.
Note that I do not intend to imply that sponsors need not know how to do proper package reviews. The guidelines for becoming a sponsor currently and should continue to specify that having done some package reviews is important to the process. The same goes for actually maintaining packages. Sponsors should know both the mechanics of maintaining packages and the standards for package quality.
Hopefully this will open up the actual reviewing to the community as a whole, eliminating one bottleneck.
We could potentially end up with people who have completed package reviews but who cannot yet actually import their packages. This would be worse than having people waiting in the sponsorship queue, because they actually did more work and someone from the community actually did some work as well. This could be mitigated through vigilance coupled with some scripting, or additional process in the packager-sponsor trac for requests that happen to fall through the cracks.
Searching bugzilla for NEEDSPONSOR tickets still open with fedora-review+ set should be a reasonable first-pass report for those waiting. Mailing a filtered version of that to the sponsors would probably be effective but annoying.
- J<
2015-11-17 2:42 GMT+01:00 Jason L Tibbitts III tibbs@math.uh.edu:
I recently filed https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1499 with the goal of making the process just a bit simpler for new packagers. The text of my proposal follows. Please make sure that substantial comments are made on the ticket to ensure that FESCo sees them.
tl;dr: Relax the requirement that sponsors be directly involved in the package review process.
Sponsors are responsible (but not solely responsible) for shepherding people through the packaging process. They should know how to do reviews, but there is nothing so special about a packager's first review that it cannot be handled by the regular packager community. We trust packagers to do every other package review, after all. We also allow new packagers to be sponsored without actually going through the package review process at all via the comaintainer process so what we appear to be emphasizing is that someone is there to assist and monitor the new contributor and not that the contributor make it through the arduous process of a package review with a highly restricted pool of reviewers.
Proposal: Decouple sponsorship from the review process.
Allow the community to do reviews as normal. Remove the requirement that the first review be done by a sponsor.
agreed
Emphasize that sponsors can sponsor anyone separate from the review process. They can sponsor them before the review has been done, after it has been done, in the middle of the process, whatever. (This is all currently true in any case, but the process documents link most everything to the completion of a review.)
Notes: Obviously sponsorship should still be tied to package maintenance in some way; sponsoring someone without any intention of having them work on a package in some way is pointless.
Note that I do not intend to imply that sponsors need not know how to do proper package reviews. The guidelines for becoming a sponsor currently and should continue to specify that having done some package reviews is important to the process. The same goes for actually maintaining packages. Sponsors should know both the mechanics of maintaining packages and the standards for package quality.
Hopefully this will open up the actual reviewing to the community as a whole, eliminating one bottleneck.
We could potentially end up with people who have completed package reviews but who cannot yet actually import their packages. This would be worse than having people waiting in the sponsorship queue, because they actually did more work and someone from the community actually did some work as well. This could be mitigated through vigilance coupled with some scripting, or additional process in the packager-sponsor trac for requests that happen to fall through the cracks.
It's all the more important then to formalize requirements from new packagers like having done two quality reviews and link them back to their first package tickets.
Though the main bottleneck is time to properly mentor new packagers.
Regards, H.
Searching bugzilla for NEEDSPONSOR tickets still open with fedora-review+ set should be a reasonable first-pass report for those waiting. Mailing a filtered version of that to the sponsors would probably be effective but annoying.
- J<
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"H" == Haïkel hguemar@fedoraproject.org writes:
H> It's all the more important then to formalize requirements from new H> packagers like having done two quality reviews and link them back to H> their first package tickets.
That's sort of an orthogonal issues, but honestly I don't believe anything should be required of a packager besides the proper maintenance of a single high-quality package. That's all many contributors, particularly upstreams, care about. And we want those contributors too (quite a bit, I'd think).
If the community says a package submission is good, and a sponsor is willing to make themselves available as to help the packager through the process of getting the package onto end user machines and providing direct support (in addition to the community which should always be there for assistance) then I don't see what else we should make a packager do. The practice of demanding practice reviews is just something that some sponsors would like to see, but it's never been a hard requirement. And it would be really unfortunate if it was, because nothing like that is required for sponsorship via the comaintainer route.
H> Though the main bottleneck is time to properly mentor new packagers.
I find that I have time to do that while not having time to actually do package reviews. I do really thorough reviews and they take a while.
- J<