New Package Process

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Enrico Scholz wrote:

> gdk at redhat.com (Greg DeKoenigsberg) writes:
> 
> > How will we scale this project to a million packages?
> 
> I do not think that we will have millions of packages... freshmeat
> lists around 35000 packages and we (Core + Extras) are currently at
> 2000 packages.

s/million/bazillion or any arbitrarily large number.  I certainly don't 
intend to be didactic.

> > Because that's the goal.  The goal of Fedora Extras, in my mind, is to
> > provide all of the software in the world to all of the people in the
> > world.  Nothing less.
> 
> I would add the word 'high-quality' somewhere... Thousands of crappy
> packages do not help somebody and make the repository useless.

You know, that *sounds* like a good argument, but on further reflection, I
don't *actually* think that's true.  Is Sourceforge any less useful
because there are thousands of poorly-maintained projects?  No, it isn't.  
Sourceforge excels because it gives users all of the info they need about
those projects, so that they make make their own determinations about
projects are, or aren't, "high-quality".

I agree with this statement: a pile of undifferentiated packages, some of 
which are crap and some of which aren't, is bad.

But that doesn't have to be the way we do it.

> > 1. Novice packager builds crap package with the assistance of 
> > fe-pkg-builder.
> > 2. Novice packager puts crap package thru fe-pkg-lint, which points out 
> > large chunks of crap.
> 
> Where can I download fe-pkg-lint? ;) IMO, you can detect only a small
> class of errors by automatic tests, real QA needs human intervention.

It's a continuum.  QA tools can never fully replace human QA.  In the
short term, you may (or may not) be right when you say that automatic
tests can only detect a small class of errors.  In the long term, though,
a good tool can grow to handle a large number of cases, and we really do 
need to start *somewhere*, don't we?

And as far as where you can go to download fe-pkg-lint, of course the 
answer is that we have to write it, and we have to mandate its use, and we 
have to commit to making it more useful over time.

Standard disclaimer: I could, as always, be completely wrong.

--g

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