FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-03-20

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:18:47 +0000 (UTC)
kevin.kofler at chello.at (Kevin Kofler) wrote:

> It's sad that FESCo is abusing the trust of the contributors who
> elected them by voting for such a resolution, when it's far from
> clear that Fedora package maintainers in general favor this. See for
> example:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-March/msg01505.html
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-March/msg01612.html

Uh... 2 out of 579 is hard to gather a general opinion from. 
In addition, many folks might have voted for FESCo members to vote for
the right thing, and not via a popularity contest. 

> My point that this allows anyone to hold progress by coming up with a 
> bogus "draft guideline" which covers dozens of packages which went
> into Fedora just fine with the generic guidelines (which is exactly
> what is happening with the Java packages now) was not discussed at
> all either.

No. Only if such a 'draft guideline' was compelling enough for the
Packging committee to decide that packages in that area should wait for
it to be finalized. This is not automatic... it requires the packaging
folks to decide so.  

> And that "Please note that Java guidelines are up for approval at
> next week's FPC meeting." note is just a red herring, while the
> problem _may_ indeed be solved for Java soon (and even that is not
> sure, most likely the draft will have to go through a couple of
> iterations until it's accepted), there are countless of other areas
> where this problem can come up. For example OO.o extensions have been
> mentioned in the meeting. I was intending to get openoffice.org-kde
> packaged in time for F9, but with the current state of affairs it
> looks like that ain't gonna happen.

Perhaps you could work on finalizing the guidelines then? 

> Fedora is about showcasing the latest technology, if each time a new
> technology is introduced, we have to wait months to get a packaging
> guideline for it, and all packages using the new technology are
> blocked on that, where does that leave us?

Why are we waiting months? Why aren't people helping finalize
guidelines? Because there is no incentive to do so? 

Once packages have entered the collection it is MUCH harder to change
them and make them conform to a good packaging guidelines. 
Is it really that hard to come up with good packaging guidelines for
new tech?

>         Kevin Kofler

kevin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20080320/bc883119/attachment.sig>