Hi,
For those that don't know me, my name is Don Zickus, a RHEL kernel engineer
for the last decade or so. I am the group lead of various projects
including the Fedora kernel workflow changes.
I know as Jeremy and Justin have rolled out changes recently there have been
concerns over technical and non-technical issues. While they are happy to
make various tweaks to the workflow that might have broken during the
conversion, I am asking for some of the bigger concerns, folks reach out to
me.
A couple of years ago, I convinced Laura Abbott and Jeremy to pursue this
workflow change with me and they implemented the pieces to make this work.
Laura even gave a talk about this at Flock in 2019.
I am sure there are pieces we overlooked in our attempt to change the
workflow and over the next few months we will try to address what makes
sense. I just ask folks to redirect their concerns to me and work with us
to get them resolved.
The two concerns I am aware that need addressing are:
* broken out patches
* handle drive-by users who know dist-git by not the source git tree
Is there any other large concern with the new workflow?
-----
Why did we go this way?
* The goal was to create a proper development environment and have
developers use the Fedora ecosystem to do their work in a natural way and
easily leverage creating and building rpms, using CI services and any
other Fedora infrastructure. IOW make it easier to use Fedora as the
place to do development.
* Another goal was to respectfully integrate the RHEL kernel workflow
(_without_ removing Fedora freedoms and liberties) such that our partners
and customers can contribute to the stability of this kernel in
preparation for future RHEL kernels. Increasing focus on Fedora kernel
was considered a good thing.
The downside of this approach is the impact on those users who prefer a
dist-git world.
The result we have today is what the RHEL development world has looked like
for 10+ years. Is it perfect? No. Is there better ways to do things?
Absolutely.
The Fedora kernel is not the only package going in this direction. Dozens
of other packages are looking to packages like the kernel to see what this
world would look like. As a leader in this direction, there will be
unforseen bumps that we need to work through.
However, over time, we would like this new source git tree world to be a new
type of standard and the dist-git world a mechanical back-end process.
We understand not everyone will agree with this change, but are hopeful that
we can work with everyone to address the concerns respectfully and still
achieve our goal of having Fedora be the easiest and most natural way to do
upstream development.
Thanks!
Cheers,
Don