reviving Fedora Legacy

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Mon Oct 13 01:02:30 UTC 2008


On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 7:47 AM, Chuck Anderson <cra at wpi.edu> wrote:
> 2. Jeff Spaleta wanted metrics and verification to be sure the UAEL
> maintainers were actually doing their job and maintaining the packages
> they said they would, and metrics to be sure no one maintainer took on
> too large of a load to prevent from getting burned out.
>
> I think it is unrealistic to require more oversight for UAEL than
> there is for regular Fedora maintainers.  Trust that they will do the
> work.  If they don't, follow the same policies and procedures we have
> to deal with that in Fedora today.

I think its unrealistic to not require more oversight for something
that is essentially an open-ended commitment.  if you are going to
leave it as an open-ended commitment with no firm EOL on the branch
then yes... i want metrics to make sure we aren't leaving people stuck
in a weird state for critical but unmaintained items for what could be
years.  I also do not accept the idea that its okay to open up a
Fedora branded branch which gives users absolutely no guidance as to
how long the packages branch will be usable.  I think its a poor use
of the brand.

I'm not talking about QA.. I'm talking about verifying that the
volunteer maintainers are actually still in place a year+ later.  How
do make users aware that packages are unmaintained for 1+ years? Do
you plan to expire unmaintained packages so new users don't have
access to them?You have to have some process to verify that the
maintainers are there because you are explicitly stating that the life
of branch depends on an accurate count of the active maintainers. if
you don't build a process to try to verify maintainer involvement..the
branches could live forever because there is no pre-defined EOL.

If the UAEL draft is not updated to include some firm EOL
expectations, I will continue to push back concerning metrics as to
maintainer commitment because the plan relies on maintainer commitment
to set the EOL timeframe.  How to address that concern is completely
unexplored because up till this point the proponents haven't cared to
try to address it.

Honestly after several days of discussion this week are the proponents
any further along than what was proposed in the UAEL draft? I haven't
seen a single new idea.  Until someone new, who is committed to moving
an implementation forward steps forward, this discussion is moot.
Would WPI give you some infrastructure resources to burn on this to
supplement existing project infrastructure to demonstrate that it was
a sustainable effort?


-jef




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