fedora-maintainers et al [fab] State of Fedora (a long email)

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 07:02, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> Looking at the fedora-maintainers list archives, it does not become clear
> at all what the purpose [and target group] of that list is and what its
> content guidelines are.

Yes, there has been some misuse.

>
> Clearly a lot of the content on that list since May 2005 cannot be
> considered a required reading by *all* Fedora maintainers. And please,
> don't just ask "For example?", but skim over the archives yourself.

Happens on every list.

> Adding to that, after it had been said that all Fedora Extras package
> maintainers get subscribed to the list automatically and that subscription
> is mandatory, this has not become true. It is not even clear whether all
> Core maintainers are subscribed to the list. Effectively, there is no way
> to address *all* maintainers and no way either to address all Extras
> maintainers, because fedora-extras-list is avoided like the plague by
> [probably many] Extras packagers due to past review-traffic madness.

fedora-maintainers was created for just that purpose.  Every Fedora maintainer 
should be subscribed as that's where we're going to announce (and discuss) 
issues that matter to all maintainers.  Freezes, lib bumps, compiler changes, 
guideline updates, etc...  The traffic even now is not too much.  Rather than 
abandoning it and splintering out into foo-announce and whatever I'd much 
rather just get people to use fedora-maintainers, and read 
fedora-maintainers.  It really should be part of your responsibility as a 
package maintainer of Fedora.  Also, creating yet another extras specific 
list makes no sense when we're trying to merge core and extras together into 
one package "Pangaea".   Splintering off communication doesn't make sense.

> Apart from that, commenting on messages to fedora-extras-commits becomes
> inconvienient and inefficient, because its "Reply-To:" to
> fedora-extras-list at redhat.com is the wrong target as the packager might
> not be subscribed there.

Personally I think doing a reply-all which would point the reply to the 
maintainer and cc fedora-maintainers-list would be appropriate, especially 
once commit messages are from all the packages, not just Extras.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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