On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 07:47:02AM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
Packaging is not "art", it is an engineering task. We should focus on packaging software correctly, not on beautifying a build script.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels like this. My earlier "pain in the ass" comment about getting packages in fedora.us mostly came as a result of someone commenting on one of my perl module packages, saying it didn't match the templates and should be redone.
I only have two complaints about the fedora.us QA process right now. As near as I can tell, the only review that has happened of any of the packages I've submitted so far has been a couple of people picking apart my spec files for issues of style, not correctness. Personally, I think style issues should be reserved for *after* any package has made it into testing, at least.
My only other complaint, and it really is more of a suggestion, is that it would be *really* nice if the easy things (like "does this package build") were automated. It would be *really* nice if the automatically-built packages were put into a repository (accompanied by USE AT YOUR OWN RISK warnings) that reviewers could download and test from. At that point it becomes almost zero effort for interested people (like me) to install a package on a test box and let it run for a while.
Steve