Fedora Extras is extra

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 01:53:30 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:
> Why don't you start lowering the manpower by automating stuff and allow
> people to play along. 

I'm pretty sure thats the sort of thing Red Hat is internally working
on as part of lauching Fedora Extras.  No one is going to argue with
you that fedora.us's infrastructure has been lacking. Its a catch-22
really. If Red Hat had not chosen to merge fedora.us into an official
Fedora Extras I think more effort would have been made to extend
fedora.us's infrastructure. But because Red Hat has been working to
prepare a new infrastructure for Extras there has been considerable
debate about the usefulness of building up fedora.us's infrastructure
in the meantime just to scrap it. Hindsight is 20/20... i doubt few
people inside Red Hat or inside fedora.us leadership thought it would
take as long as it has to get Red Hat's internal build system ready
for the merger.  In fact... someone has promised me to eat a shoe on
national television if i can find a station willing to broadcast it..
because Extras was not ready in time for fc3 release.  C'mon... whose
going to willingly promise me to eat their shoe unless they seriously
thought everything would be ready in time.

> The day I do that, the QA queue of fedora.us will be 4x as big as it is
> now and it will take a long time for these packages to even hit the
> repository (if ever).

I will fully submit to you that the QA process as originally concieved
is not the the long term solution. And in fact changes have already
been made to relieve the QA burden for "trusted" packagers inside the
fedora.us process....the evolution of the QA concept will continue...
and people who are committed to using the process will have a much
more qualified say in its evolution than those people who refuse to
work with it, even when its grosquely malformed. The QA pre-release
process is a work in progress... but the concept itself is useful for
many reasons even if the exact implementation details and balance are
not completely worked out.  And I tell you this... I highly doubt the
concept is going to dissappear completely in Fedora Extras. Peer
review and QA will be one of the strongest mechanisms for new
packagers to gain trust in the Extras process and build system...
there is no other way to build a community process.

> 
> I wouldn't be able to update or add new packages because of the overhead
> that is demanded of me by the policies and procedures that currently lack
> any automation or infrastructure.

Again... I believe this is exactly the things Red Hat is aiming to
solve with its infrastructure. And because Red Hat is working on it
internally.. there is has been a reluctance to duplicate that effort
at fedora.us just to scrap fedora.us when Red Hat is ready for the
merger. Take a step back then take two step forward and you are doing
the fedora infrastructure shuffle.

> 
> There is a reason why there still aren't any FC3 packages. I don't want to
> pressure Red Hat and I think this thread is not worth everyone's time
> spend. But don't give the impression that I'm not willing to cooperate or
> that it is possible to add packages today, because it simply is NOT.

I know its not. But i will be frank with you. I am under the distinct
impression... that your other pressures to keep packages trees for
older rhl and rhel releases greatly impacts how far you are willing to
bend to be able to contribute to an official Fedora Extras tree when
it does open up. There is no malice in my statement. I fully
understand that as a 3rd party repository maintainer you have your own
established userbase to consider. But I'm not sure how far Red Hat's
infrastructure and fedora extras policy will be able to accomedate the
other constraints you impose on yourself by supporting all those other
trees with your packages.

> 
> First work on the infrastructure before you add voluntary manpower,
> otherwise you're effectively wasting manpower and potentially ruining a
> community project. It currently does not scale, tools are missing.

Tools are missing... Red Hat has internal effort to work on this. 

> Look, we've effectively zero'd all duplication effort by simplying sharing
> and merging our SPEC files and SPEC development. 4 repositories now are no
> longer developing their own stuff. 

thats 4... out of what.... 3000. I refuse to limit discussion to the
big repos. there are many many smaller repos out there that deserve to
be included in any general discussion of costs and duplication.  And i
will argue that whatever gains you get from sharing common spec
files... is amplified by sharing a common build system competely.  And
the idea of "Fedora Collections" is a future path that demands
cetralized package building... as the basis for media set generation.

-jef