On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 18:47:37 +0200, Iago Rubio wrote:
On Sat, 2021-08-14 at 09:04 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
wrote:
> I think there's some idea to rescue here. I agree that adopting
> orphaned packages can be harder than it seems, but OTOH, it's a task
> that has big benefits for the community. In the past, the recommended
> way to become a packager, and the way that had the easiest process,
> was to add a new package. This made a lot of sense when the distro
> was
> smaller and there were always new things that could be reasonably
> added. Nowadays, we either have most upstream projects packaged, or
> they are very big and complex to package, or have many dependencies,
> or legal issues, or there just isn't that much need to have them
> packaged. And all other things being equal, I it's better to have one
> package maintained continuously, than a package maintained for some
> time and then dropped, and another package maintained. While we may
> have a constant of 1 package maintained, the second case disappoints
> users.
>
> tl;dr: I think we should change the guidelines [1] to explicitly
> recommend opening a pull request for an orphaned package as one of
> the
> ways. Maybe even describe it first. And describe the steps that need
> to be done in detail, so that it's easy to unexperienced folks to
> follow.
>
I can feel the pain of Stephen, as I went through something like that
some years ago, and was quite frustrating.
I was at that time main developer of a small project that was on every
distro, and I was a Fedora user.
I went ahead to build the rpm for fedora and got some tips about how to
improve the spec but I was never able to get an sponsor, and was told
the spec was not fit for Fedora.
In the meantime another user grabbed the spec and sources from
project's csv and submited it as his first package for review.
He got an sponsor right away and became the maintainer of the package,
without changing a line of what I had in csv.
That's very odd. The guidelines remain the same for all of us. So a spec
that didn't pass a review the first time should not pass the review
again without changes.
It was really frustrating ... to the point I've never submited another
package for review.
A better - or more clear - way to become a package maintaner would
help.
Some of us would like to help, but can't find a clear way to do
it.
I think we're always open to suggestions. So if you have any, please do
share them with us.
Sponsorship to the packager group is based on trust---trust that the
candidate knows the packaging pipeline and guidelines well enough. How
individual sponsors come about trusting candidates is quite a personal
thing I guess, but generally submitting good packages for review and
showing the understanding of guidelines by doing reviews is quite
sufficient.
That is not the only way, though. Co-maintaining, pull requests,
personal relationships are all ways of earning community trust, as
documented here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_get_sponsored_into_the_packager_group
This was recently developed (last few weeks!) as a centralised place to
look for sponsors:
https://docs.pagure.org/fedora-sponsors/
I don't think it's been added to all the necessary docs yet, but it will
soon.
--
Thanks,
Regards,
Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" (He / Him / His) |
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
Time zone: Europe/London