new RPM version and Feature process (was: Re: Heads-up: brand new RPM version about to hit rawhide)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 09.07.2008 12:51, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> At long last, we are about to get a brand new RPM version (alpha snapshot 
> at the moment) into rawhide. The list of changes from 4.4.2.x is massive 
> and a full summary needs a separate posting (will follow as time permits), 
> this is just a heads-up of immediate consequences for Fedora packagers and 
> rawhide consumers:

Sounds great, thanks Panu and others! Much appreciated and looked 
forward to.

But this announcement made me wondering: We have a big and complicated 
Feature process [1] in Fedora that keeps a whole lot of people and 
committees (especially FESCo) busy. Afaics the new RPM version is 
something that can be considered a "feature" [2]. It was afaics not 
approved yet by FESCO [3] or even proposed [4]. I would expect going 
backwards to an older RPM in rawhide later will be next to impossible or 
very very hard. IOW: once it's in rawhide for a few days FESCO kind of 
has no other chance then to approve this feature, in case it ever comes 
up for a Feature vote in a FESCo meeting.

So is the most of the Feature process (and especially FESCo's approval) 
useless overhead? It looks to me that the answer tends to be "yes" as 
long as big features like this can easily creep in without going through 
the established approval process, as long as the feature gets added to 
rawhide early enough in the devel cycle.

Just wondering. No, I really don't want to stop the new RPM; there are 
likely other examples (say OpenOffice 3.0) in rawhide (but going 
backwards there as hard as with RPM). But I'm more and more wondering if 
the complex Feature process is worth all the trouble and effort. The 
best thing that came out of it in F9 IMHO were the good release notes 
and great "whats new" pages. But I'd say we can have that easier.

CU
knurd

[1]
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy

[2]
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy#Definition_of_a_Feature

[3]
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:AcceptedFedora10

[4]
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:ProposedFedora10
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CategoryProposedFeature