Package Review Stats for the week ending January 18th, 2009

[Robert Scheck]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Can we please be done with this kind of blanket statements as well as "Red Hat
> vs the community" comments?  They are derogatory, demoralizing, and border on
> offensive.  And after the third time, simply frustrating.  Red Hat has some of
> the best engineers in the world, perhaps some of the worst if you wish, and
> most probably a lot of average ones.  So what?

Such comparisons must happen. And if you would have read my mail correctly
or even checked what I'm saying, you would have seen, that my examples with
the Merge Reviews are true. In that cases it was even blocking/refusing the
Merge Reviews (or parts of it) - the old story from my December 2008 mail.

When looking e.g. to ethtool, the maintainer was allowed, not to show up
ever on the Merge Review, once I asked Tom Callaway to give him a clout. As
co-maintainer, I've solved the Merge Review, fixed all open bug reports the
maintainer did not take care about, but I can't co-maintain every package.
The ethtool maintainer being upstream as well, did after Tom's clout only
one time reply to my e-mails and to a bug report. So one time in ~ 6 years,
that's neither a good behaviour for a downstream maintainer, nor even for
an upstream one. And when talking in #fedora-devel, I got told, that I am
not alone with this issue.

> Most of what is seen as "Red Hat guys are bad at packaging" is simply baggage
> held from the Core days.  Unfortunately (for us "Red Hat guys") most Core
> packages were simply thrown upon us as part of our job.  I would never
> *volunteer* to do packaging, as that's not what I'm best at.  If someone wants
> to go ahead and take maintainership of all my packages, I very well appreciate
> it.  I'm sure many other "Red Hat guys" are in the same boat.

Taking co-maintainship or even the package doesn't solve 'em all, as I
pointed out above already. If the "Red Hat guy" is upstream of software,
it's more hard to work around.

> proud Red Hat employee, poor package maintainer, RPM n00b.

Last of it could be easily solved by getting a RPM training, isn't there a
training department inhouse of your employer?


Greetings,
  Robert