On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 9:40 AM Peter Robinson <pbrobinson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 2:28 PM Stephen Smoogen <ssmoogen@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, 2 Jun 2023 at 07:20, Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> Lets not make this a drama.
>>
>> Package maintenance changes have never gone through change proposals.
>>
>
> I am  sorry, but this was made into a drama by the way this was executed. Surprise is the opposite of engagement and dropping a ton of packages and their dependencies and then announcing it is absolute surprise.
>
> This isn't just package maintenance. This is a major change in what is expected to be included in the next workstation editions with the removal of expected functionality. If the packages are not picked up within a certain amount of time or can be rebuilt it means many packages will need to be edited. Those changes need to be researched, announced, and pushed through.
>
> It is also drama because people in the community have no idea what else will take place? When uncertainty and doubt are allowed into the conversation, people jump to the extremes so they can feel ready to deal with it.
>
> Could we try something different for future changes?
> 1. Announce that Red Hat will be moving from owning said packages and dependencies on X date.
> 2. Let people grieve about things for a short while but make it clear its happening. See if community members or other companies will take up the burden
> 3. Do the orphan or hand over of packages to the new group.
>
> Instead of 3,1,2?

That may not always be possible, sometimes it involves departure or
changes of roles for people and those can be delicate and are not
always notifiable. I'm not sure that is the case here but I do know,
from a blog post [1], that the previous maintainer is no longer at Red
Hat.

Peter

[1] https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2023-05-15-caolan.html

Yeah, Matthias posting this email was us trying to give the community proper notice. Caolan leaving accelerated things a lot here and also since we felt it correct to inform people about how our plans around RHEL informed this decision in Fedora we needed to spend some time getting internal approval for that, as engineers we don't have the authority to share what could be seen as Red Hat product plans publicly. 

So while I understand that people like things to be announced with longer horizons it is simply not always possible. We got this message out as soon as we could.

Christian