On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 3:42 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I disagree. "Ownership" within Fedora is one aspect
we've tried to
address, but we're pretending that Fedora "owns" the code base which
is a falsity. There are many more people involved and in this
specific kind of situation, pretending there aren't is just odd.
Only if you consider packaging metadata to be part of "the code base".
I guess that's the crux of the issue, some people want to treat it
this way and others don't.
Fedora's attitude, at least officially, has hitherto been that
"packaging metadata" is managed downstream by packagers as a group. I
struggle to see why "upstream author considers the package spec part
of their upstream project and does not want other Fedora packagers to
touch it without going through upstream" is all that different from
"downstream packager considers spec they wrote to be their private
project and does not want other Fedora packagers to touch it without
going through them".
That being said, you are right that people are ignoring the existing
guidelines, and so maybe something should be changed.
> If this is really something that's necessary, maybe it would
be good
> to require someone's approval (FESCo? FPC?) to maintain a package
> outside of Fedora dist-git. Then at least the number of such packages
> could be hopefully kept low.
That's a thing that could be done, but I'm skeptical it will help much
without the other things.
Sure, this would be in addition to having some metadata on the package
to indicate external management. I am just suggesting that we
shouldn't let packagers do this themselves; some external body or
person should need to sign off on it first.
And as Matthew said, perhaps a requirement for approving this
arrangement could be that the packager in question agrees to respect
changes in dist-git (or automatically opened Pagure pull requests, or
whatever) made by other people?
Ben Rosser