closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 07:16 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Don't put more bureaucracy or hurdles in the way. 

That's a sensible request.

> That won't scale and
> will frustrate people and some will feel a second-class citizen (I
> already feel unwanted more and more in Fedora-land after this discussion
> because I never found time to learn proper programming -- mostly due to
> fact that most of my free time is already filled with Fedora-related work).

I'm sorry you feel that way, and I believe that you shouldn't. They are
two entirely separate skill sets, and it doesn't necessarily follow that
a non-programmer packager should be 'training' to become a programmer,
or vice versa.

You are very good at packaging software, and not a programmer. There's
no shame in that. I am... well, I manage to scrape a living by
programming, but I suck at packaging things because I don't have the
attention-span for it. I don't feel particularly shameful about that
either.

Shipping software and supporting it requires input from both of us. I'd
like us to have a sensible discussion about how we handle that
requirement, without anyone feeling unwanted.

> We have a lot of non-hackers that maintain packages in Fedora and it
> worked well so far and that in parts made Fedora what it is today. What
> IMHO would be good instead of what you outline: groups of people (SIGs)
> a package-monkey can contact if he needs help to fix or improve
> something needs programming skills.

Fundamentally, that's fairly much what I was saying. Christian phrases
it slightly better, mostly IMHO because he stresses "can and *should*".
But I think we are fairly much in agreement about what we'd like to
happen in principle; we're just not sure on the details of how to
achieve it.

I'll follow up to a different mail on that topic...

-- 
dwmw2