On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:59:30 +0200, AL (Alec) wrote:
Still, besides this sad experience, isn't this the kind of
cooperation
we should encourage? Now and then those great people with great apps
want their app in Fedora. Instead of saying "Wonderful, welcome", we
send them a list of an actually quite complicated set of requirements to
become a packager. But those people don't want that, they just want
their application packaged. And although they havn't the packaging
skills, they know their app. And that's actually a damned good starting
point.
Is it? You want packages that will be well-maintained and will stay
in the distribution for more than half a year.
There have been packages, which have been trivial to review'n'approve
because of the simplicity of their spec files, but that doesn't mean the
packager/maintainer follows Fedora closely enough as necessary to handle
bugzilla/ABRT tickets, rebuilds, updates, bug-fixes, or packaging-fixes
(reported by scripts or for Rawhide). For various reasons. Oh, it's fun
if some breakage seems to be specific to Fedora (or specific to
leading-edge releases), and an upstream maintainer is not interested
in dealing with that.
Sometimes even Rawhide's daily broken deps report is considered
intimidating. I've answered tons of mails when I generated the extra
broken deps reports for the released dists. And more often than not, the
mails were negative and not positive/curious.
The package review process ensures that the packagers learn
to know what will be necessary to build in a minimum build environment
such as with koji/mock and that there are several packaging mistakes
which lead to increased trouble/maintenance or even unreproducible builds.
What I'm talking about is to tell these great people that there
are two
ways to get their app packaged. One way is to become a packager, and so
far this discussion is about that path,. Obviously, the requirements
here are beyond knowing an app, though.
The other way should be to find, persuade (bribe?) a packager to take
care of the package in cooperation with the developer. As I understand
it, there is no such path today(?) I think it's a pity, because the
cooperation between a developer and a packager is actually a good way of
doing it.
Sure there is! And that's _two_ people already, who would work on the
package. The theory fails, if there is no volunteer packager to begin
with.
And anyway, how many packages have more than one _active_ maintainer?
It would be fairly easy for interested packagers to become co-maintainers
and become more familiar with Fedora Packaging that way.
--
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