On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 20:05:06 +0200 (EET), Panu Matilainen wrote:
The amount of nitpicking trusted developers produce (among themselves) is enough to scare off anybody starting in packaging I'm willing to bet :)
This must change, although often it is separated between suggestions and blocker criteria. But at the same time, new packagers should not come with slightly modified packages from e.g. Mandrake Cooker which bzip2 even the smallest patch, or generic packages which contain dozens of lines of conditional code which tries to adapt to a build environment.
A fundamental problem is "packager mentality". If a packager has the impression that a QA person is the nitpicking bad guy who's nothing else than a PITA, then the whole concept of working together on a community maintained repository is doomed to fail. If on the other hand, the packager is at least a bit open for suggestions or established common practise, everything works better.