On Friday 09 January 2004 19:22, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:42:38PM -0500, Gene C. wrote:
I am hopeful that the Red Hat folks will speak on the Fedora Extras subject soon (their lack of comment is very noticeable). Some of this discussion
Well, I have two reasons for not commenting: o We don't have the CVS server up yet, and I believe that action should come before talk here. o I'm doing a lot of listening. Overall it is important to me that it not be so hard or confusing to do that people don't do it. I think that the rules can be simple and exceptions worked out on an individual basis; that's what we've done internally. We need rules, with rationale, better codified -- which is one thing we liked about fedora.us in the first place -- but I think that we need to make sure that people aren't put off too much by the rules we have, and I think that I've got more listening to do before I speak.
Great! This sounds reasonable.
I am a bit disturbed by some of this discussion and the egos that are expressed ... it seems like there is a lot of not-invented-here stuff. Right now I believe that ESR (and the 40 packages he maintains) has been definitely alienated by this discussion.
I really like Alex's bleeding/testing/good/stable classification of packages. It should be easy to get packages into the bleeding or testing categories but to get into either good or stable should require lots more QA. By QA I mean TESTING by lots of people ... not code reviews by a couple of "experts". My experience is that very subtle bugs (or intentional compromises) can fool even experts who have access to source code but lots of testing (running the software) by lots of people can reveal that the software does have problems (even if they cannot point to specific causes). Your do not get lots of testing if the package is not "available".
I am also seeing QA requirements well beyond what Red Hat does internally (from my perspective) and what I believe is reasonable. While I believe that some QA rules are needed, lets make them realistic ... lots of rules about package format are reasonable but the quality of the code in the package will only be discovered through testing (actually running the software).
As I see it, a lot of the Extras (fedora.us) packages are more like the gftp package rather than the kernel, gcc, or glibc which need lots of testing before becoming stable. For gftp, Red Hat has taken the software package from upstream and then packaged it for Red Hat / Fedora Core making sure that it puts stuff into the correct directories, etc. However, the Red Hat folks do not make sure that the software is working as it should ... that is an upstream responsibility. The 2.0.14 version of gftp which is part of FC-1 has problems with http. I worked with the upstream maintainer/developer to fix these problems and most of the fixes are in 2.0.16 (with the remainder in CVS). While there is no gftp update for FC1, 2.0.16 is available in rawhide (development) for those with the need.
IMHO, the objective for Extras should be for a set of packages which do not conflict with anything in Core (or other Extras packages) and which have a classification which reflects actual user experience with that software. The Extras process should honor and promote this objective.