[fab] rant: why does it take so long to prepare a firefox update for FC5?

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> > How can the community help?  If the patch is in the wild, try to
> > compile with the patch.  If the compile fails, fix it, and provide a
> > working patch / srpm in the bug.  That way just about any package
> > monkey (like me) could push it through the build system.
> 
> Well, as I wrote, the updated spec file is in CVS already for some days 
> now and it build and works fine here on FC5 x86_64.
> 
> Further: How could Red Hat help? *Red Hat should ask for help in 
> situations like this!* There are a lot of people around in 
> Extras/Fedora-land that are willing to help in situations like this, but 
> probably nobody is going to step up without a external trigger. We are 
> used to @redhat-maintainers that take care of their packages on their own.

+1.

So let's ask this question: why are we not making more progress on the 
"community maintainers working on core" dilemma?

The answer, from where I sit: we're bogged down in technical details.  
Fedora Core and RHEL still share a lot of infrastructure, and while we're 
in the process of pushing FC6 / RHEL5 out the door, we're not going to 
have a lot of cycles to solve this problem.

Also, unlike with Extras, we can't simply *do it*.  RHEL needs the Fedora 
linkage.

The next question, then: what processes can we put in place that will
allow trusted community developers to submit patches in a "fast track"  
way, such that the official RH maintainer can simply take a quick look,
rebuild, and release?

It could be as simple as adding a keyword to bugzilla.

> <unfair mode>
> Well, that factor didn't stop Ubuntu from releasing a Firefox update 
> even slightly before mozilla.org did:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2006-July/000367.html
> Tue Jul 25 09:49:50 BST 2006
> </unfair mode>

It's not unfair at all.  It's the key comparison.

Marketing is one thing -- and Ubuntu does really well at that because
they're built to do exactly that -- but technical excellence is another.  
If Ubuntu is getting updates out faster than the current version of
Fedora, then Fedora needs to catch up.  And if that means figuring out a 
way to empower community developers *now*, then that's exactly what we 
need to do.

> BTW, I hope we get something like the comaintainership in Core in the 
> longer term (see
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-July/msg00960.html
> for the plans on co-maintainership in Extras -- I hope this can 
> influence Core in the longer term, too)

Yep.  IMHO, it's the next most important thing we need to figure out.

--g

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