Disappointed: My feature was removed without notifying me

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Wed Oct 8 21:33:43 UTC 2008


Am Mittwoch, den 08.10.2008, 13:24 -0600 schrieb Kevin Fenzi:
> On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:09:12 +0200
> christoph.wickert at googlemail.com (Christoph Wickert) wrote:
> 
> > Am Mittwoch, den 08.10.2008, 12:38 -0400 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
> > > Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler at chello.at) said: 
> > > > Bill Nottingham <notting <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > > > > There are descriptions which are translated as well....
> > > > 
> > > > Well, leave it blank, leave it in English (untranslated), put
> > > > just a URL for the upstream web page as the description
> > > 
> > > ... or, actually follow the string freeze, and the string freeze
> > > break policy.
> > 
> > The first constructive statement I hear from a FeSCo member. In fact
> > you are the _only_ FeSCo member who responded to my mail at all.
> 
> Sorry, I can't speak for the rest of the FESCo members, but I have been
> really busy with my regular job and also I have been mostly in
> agreement with the posts by Bill. To expect everyone to respond to a
> post on a busy list in under 24 hours can be a bit much.

Sorry for waiting only 23:28 hours before I expected a response ;) I
have seen these people (at least some of them) posting mails on this
list in the last 24 hours, so I assume they have read my mail too.

> > >   * Package Reviews  (were not fully done)
> > 
> > But that's not my fault I guess.
> 
> No it's not. I feel partially to blame, as I looked at those reviews
> and they looked to be in progress, but it looks like no one is formally
> reviewing them after all. ;( 

This is Patrice's way of reviewing packages. He only assings the bug to
himself when he really starts the formal review. Otherwise he leaves the
package unassigned to not prevent somebody else from reviewing it.

> > >   * Comps: new group with id "lxde-desktop", name "LXDE"...
> > > 	o mandatory: lxde-common, lxpanel, openbox, pcmanfm
> > > 	o default: gpicview, leafpad, lxappearance, lxtask,
> > > lxterminal, obconf, xarchiver ... (wasn't done)
> > 
> > Wasn't done because
> >       * of the missing reviews
> >       * I expected someone from FeSCo to give me a go.
> 
> A go for what? Adding the comps group? 

Yes, as I wrote in reply to Toshios mail: We had endless discussions
about new groups in comps here, and IMO these were right. If every
maintainer would add new groups without permission of FeSCo and without
knowing the consequences (string freeze in my case), comps will be hosed
pretty soon.

> ...snipp...
> 
> > Obviously the only one who was at least a little informed is nirik,
> > he's also the only one who apologized for "the lack of communication"
> > in a conversation we had yesterday. 
> 
> Yes, and I am sad there was a lack of communication, and I hope things
> can be done better next time around. 

Just to clarify: I don't want to blame a single person and even if I
wanted to: You are the last one to blame, because you cared about the
feature most. Most likely because you were using LXDE on your mobile ;)

> > But nirik is wrong too: Those LXDE
> > packages that are already in Fedora are not there because they have
> > been forever but because they were part of my feature (lxtask,
> > lxterminal, lxlauncher, ...).
> 
> I'm not sure I understand this sentence... ? 
> Yes, there are other lxde packages that have passed review and are
> in, I understand that. 

In the meeting you said that "some [packages] are, but thats because
they were already in... like openbox is the windowmanager." This is not
correct. Of course openbox was already in Fedora, but lxterminal,
lxappearance, lxterminal and lxtask were not. They have entered Fedora
as part of my feature.

> > So the decision was made under the assumption that _none_ of the LXDE
> > packages has ever passed a review. How can somebody who has read the
> > feature page claim that? Why did nobody answer him back?
> 
> No, I never claimed that. I claimed that because 2 of them are missing
> then the feature must wait. Is that incorrect? 

No, that's correct, but from what wwoods and you said it _sounded_ like
none of the lx*-packages made it in. And I'm afraid that some FeSCo
members who did not read the feature page carefully enough believed that
too.
> 
> > Summing it all up: My outrage is because
> >       * nobody contacted my to ask me for status or to tell me the
> >         feature was dropped. Nobody contacted me at all.
> 
> I am very sorry for that. ;( 
> 
> >       * the wiki says [1]: "The feature owner is responsible for
> >         watching any owned pages for state changes, using the wiki
> > watch feature." That's what I did, nevertheless I did not get
> >         notified.
> 
> That needs to be changed/fixed. The wiki page watch is not sufficent
> here I don't think. 

If it's working reliably IMO it should be sufficient. This is something
we should take care of, but it's more problem for infrastructure then
for fedora-devel-lst I think.

> >       * the decision was made by people who obviously did not read the
> >         feature page and have no interest in the feature. If somebody
> >         has not read the page he should not speak up on that topic or
> >         decide about it, and if he has further question he should ask.
> 
> I don't understand this. I like the feature, I was using it on my phone
> for a while. it's a nice DE. I would love to see it in Fedora. 
> 
> It was not testable by Beta, so it shouldn't be advertised as a feature
> this time. I'm sorry that that is due to communication problems. ;( 
> I find it very unfortunate.  
> 
> It's after string freeze, but you can get an exception for that: 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/StringFreezePolicy
> 
> So, you can get things in place, and we can advertise this as a Feature
> for F11. 
> 
> >       * no FeSCo member except from Bill reacted to my previous mails.
> 
> Sorry. 

Kevin, no need for further excuses, it's ok, although I'd really like to
hear some more statements from people involved in that decision.

Nevertheless we should now focus on getting the packages into the repos
ASAP.

Regards,
Christoph




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