Ready for new RPM version?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 20:25 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> It's also important to realize that in Fedora many of our packages are
> maintained by developers (one anecdote which kind of illustrates this
> happened a few weeks ago when behdad offered to let others maintain the
> packages he is the maintainer of so he can concentrate on his upstream
> work on them).  So when you talk about getting the X package maintainers
> to run RawHide so they won't break stuff while letting the X developers
> work on their upstream code on a stable base you've got to realize that
> they're actually all upstream developers who happen to pull double duty
> by making the Fedora packages.
> 
> This isn't the case for all packages and packagers but a lot of the
> basic packages that, if they break people will think "raw hide is
> broken", are this way.  kernel, xorg, gnome platform, etc.  So you'll
> have to figure out if the people who aren't upstream developers form a
> significant base that can work with your ideas or how to adapt your
> ideas to the types of contributors that we have.

Hope no-one's getting tired of this discussion, but I think it's
interesting. :)

Yes, I do understand that. Two things:

a), fortunately, it's an idea that scales - even if we only have, say,
five pure maintainers who currently aren't running Rawhide, and two of
'em switch, that's a benefit. I'm not looking for an overnight 100%
conversion rate here...

b) I think it's important to recognize that packaging is a Big Job
that's as important as hacking. There's nothing wrong with packagers and
developers being the same people, but if you see packaging as basically
an annoyance that gets in the way of your Real Work on upstream
development, that might be a problem - if behdad was getting to feeling
that way, it sounds like he did exactly the right thing in splitting the
work up. To my way of thinking, if you're a maintainer, that's a
responsibility that should be seen as equal in importance to upstream
development.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net