Problems with core review

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I have been trying to help with the core review, and I wish to share the
major burdens I encountered:

1) Online CVS access is not available to reviewers. There is a delay of
about two hours, I believe. Packager says "I fixed it", reviewer says
"did you not forget to commit, because I don't see it"?

2) Core package owners may not be very familiar with the packaging
guidelines, or why they are actually there. Some may even think it's
just some level of bureaucracy/extra burden (in short, not very
exciting).

3) Core package owners were not asked to clean up their packages before
putting them up for review. Packages have been sitting there and then
suddenly a horde of odd and demanding people have jumped on to review
them. This also means that the quality of what being reviewed is quite
random, when a quick look at the guidelines (and doing some related
action) may have minimized the extra communication and the possibility
of reviewers burning out because of repeating the same basic things
instead of finding/fixing the more interesting issues.

4) The process is not very clear. Packagers have fixed some of the
mentioned issues and change the status to MODIFIED, packagers have fixed
some of the mentioned issues and change the status to FIXED/RAWHIDE, ...
But I assume that's getting fixed.

5) Since this is Core and includes things that are basic to the system
or have been done in some certain ways for a while, some things are more
complicated: Should Prereq be used for the very basic packages of the
system? Who should really own /usr/share/gtk-doc? If files
in /etc/profile.d should not be executable, why is every file already
there executable?!

6) Since the spec files are rarely based on rpmdev-newspec templates,
the files are not as readable as they should be. When one reviews
un-styled C code, he can simply run 'indent' on it and read it. But the
same is not easy with spec files.

Roozbeh

PS: I guess I should thank all the core packagers who were so
understanding with the early reviews, specially Matthias Clasen.