Stalled "Merge Reviews" (Re: What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Robert Scheck]

Hello Behdad,

On Tue, 09 Dec 2008, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> First, it's not like you wake up in the morning and boot your Fedora and it
> pops up a message saying "Merge reviews are not fixied, shutting system
> down."??  What's the problem really, other than some cruft left in Bugzilla?

nobody forces to you maintain a package in Fedora: Simply orphan it. Any
Fedora packager has to go through a Package Review, before the package can
ever reach Fedora. But just there was Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core before
which was maintained exclusively by Red Hat, there's no exception for the
Red Hat people. On the other hand, the exception already exists since the
Fedora 7 release - which is now 1.5 years or 3 Fedora releases.

> If you were implying that the unreviewed packages should have been removed
> from Fedora, go ahead, remove cairo, fontconfig, freetype, pango, and vte.

That would maybe wake-up the packagers to either take care of their package
or to orphan them, that somebody else, who is maybe more active can take
care of it.

> If you are implying that as their maintainer, I must incorporate the merge
> reviews and close them, no thank you, I don't mind not maintaining anything in
> Fedora, and I certainly didn't block anyone from making progress in the merge
> reviews.  When you say "The Red Hat people have to follow the Fedora packaging
> guidelines and rules same as the Fedora folks", does it mean that Fedora
> should feel free to decide what *I* work on, when it doesn't decide what
> "other Fedora folks" work on?  That doesn't feel right.

You're seeing this IMHO from the wrong point of view. Read my view above on
the beginning of this e-mail. Either Red Hat people are following the rules
1.5 years after the deadline or just orphan your package if you don't want
to maintain it. Especially blocking and stopping a Merge Review caused by
Red Hat people is worse; and answers with the context of "I'm not following
the Fedora Packaging Guidelines, because I am the maintainer and I don't
care about the Packaging Guidelines" are not valid and worse for Fedora. So
why try some Red Hat people to be an exception?

Surely, Red Hat is the biggest sponsor of Fedora etc. But why was there the
merge then of Fedora Core (hard spoken: Red Hat) and Extras (hard spoken:
all non-Red Hat) if several Red Hat people refuse to walk with Fedora as it
was planned?

> Not sure what your point was, other than making your long email even longer

Getting the Merge Reviews now - 1.5 years after they should have been done
- really done and ensuring the same packaging quality for the former Red
Hat Linux and Fedora Core packages as the other former Fedora Extras and
afterwards just Fedora packages.

I think, that's a point I'm now hereby putting on the todo list of Fedora
Project Leader - as he's a Red Hat employee and as he can maybe delegate
this via the corresponding managers to the employees. I already mentioned
that during LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin, but likes the point got lost somewhere
until now, so see this please as remembering, Paul.


Greetings,
  Robert