It's time to take this discussion off-line

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Ranjan Maitra <maitra.mbox.ignored@inbox.com> wrote:
Hi,

>
> To put it bluntly -- and the Fedora Project has done a good job at teaching
> people to be more blunt -- if you're so reluctant with regard to many simple
> things/tasks, one alternative is to sit and wait and offer your packages
> somewhere else. Such as Fedora Copr. Or hope that Fedora leadership will
> move away from current procedures more quickly -- if that still is what
> they would like to do. Then, however, much will be different, and it is
> hard to say whether "the distribution" will still be popular at all.

OK, thank you for being "blunt" but my general point is that putting in a package for review is needlessly bureaucratic and does no justice to the volunteers on either side. For example, creating the spec file (with the evolution that seems to be happening all the time) could better be automated by some script on a website. At the very least, have it suggest a skeleton. Doing so will also leave out extended review discussions. Once a package is submitted, let it go through rpmlint, etc. (and fix rpmlint to not warn on nonsensical spelling errors) doing the automated checks and speed up the process. Do you feel that it is productive for an expert to inform a submitter of basic errors which could have been caught by some auto-checking mechanism. This would reduce their loads. (R, which btw, is a far more used software, does something similar, though of course, a distribution running an entire computer can not be equated with one software package.)

> It cannot be repeated often enough: The package review queue is publicly
> visible. If a package in the queue(s) is not evaluated by anyone at all
> in the community, that means that there is no interest in the package
> or no interest in maintaining the package with the package collection.

So do you think that packages should be included only if they are in demand by multitudes? It sort of defeats the purpose of Linux. Ideally, if only two people have need for a package, and if the first person is the packager (say), then how likely is it for the second user to actually be a member of BZ and the review set, rather than go off to some other distribution (AUR, say) where things are easier to come by? (Of course, Arch is notoriously complicated to install but Antergos does get around the burden quite a bit.)

> For quite some people it is less effort to run with selfmade packages
> in a private local repo than becoming a volunteer package maintainer
> with interest in team work (for example).

Agreed! But do you want that to happen? You will then lose the ability to have more software packages then. Better to have a stringent but automated process for evaluation: if the submitter passes all the steps, let his package in or at least put it on probation. Or put it to the top of the list. Otherwise, if he has non-standard requirements, send it to BZ.


> A good first step would have been to discuss the unclear things then.

Agreed.

Thanks again for responding and the discussion!

Best wishes,
Ranjan

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