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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