Maintainers Responsibility (was alpha/beta software in Fedora 8)

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 08:51 -0700, Richi Plana wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 10:30 -0500, Brian Pepple wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 07:33 +0100, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> > > On 11/28/2007 06:56 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > We had
> > > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Schedule/MaintainerResponsibilityPolicy
> > > > which was never finished; the only thing in there is "Maintain
> > > > stability for users".  I honestly don't see how you can be much more
> > > > specific without introducing needless bureaucracy.  After all, the
> > > > alpha releases of some projects are more stable then the full releases
> > > > of others.
> > > 
> > > This seems pretty much perfect, actually.  What does it need in order to 
> > > be "finished"?
> > 
> > Really it's just looking for some feedback from the mailing lists.  I
> > started an e-mail on it before the holiday, just haven't had time to
> > send it yet.
> 
> How about adding scope of potential damage? The greater the damage to
> the end-user, the more careful the maintainer should be at choosing.
> Seriously, if it were some alpha desktop app that might, at its
> likeliest, cause the loss of sound, then fine. But if it's a DNS server
> that could poison the network or, at best, result in people within the
> network to lose connectivity (specially since the developers themselves
> have stated that it is not for production purposes and I'd like to think
> of Fedora RELEASES as production), then they should be pickier.

The importance of individual packages is pretty dependent on the use
case. For most users of a Fedora desktop, it is probably far more
disastrous if the email client or web browser crashes, than if some dns
server the haven't installed has some bugs.