An alternate proposal to answer the guidelines question.

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 20:18 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Peter Jones wrote:
> > We were talking about this on #fedora-meeting, and I was asked to write 
> > up my answer to the question of how to handle violations of the 
> > packaging guidelines.
> > 
> > It seems to me that the fundamental question is: what do I do when I 
> > find a packaging problem?
> > 
> > The answer should be:
> > 
> > 1) Contact the maintainer about it.  Start by filing a bug, work from 
> > there.  Be reasonable.
> > 2) if the maintainer doesn't respond, or won't fix it and can't satisfy 
> > you with any good reasons why not, then send a note to FESCO. 
> > Conversely, if you're a maintainer and somebody won't listen to reason 
> > about when there is a good reason not to change something, contact FESCO.
> > 3) when FESCO is notified of a problem, they appoint somebody who they 
> > trust to do the right thing to arbitrate the dispute.  The arbitrator 
> > has the right to decide right and wrong here.
> > 4) do what the arbitrator says.
> > 5) if a maintainer still doesn't fix a package, the arbitrator lets 
> > FESCO know that we need to start the orphan package process.
> > 
> 
> In general this sounds reasonable, I especially like how this procedure 
> normally shouldn't come into play, but only becomes active under exceptional 
> circumstances.
> 
> However the FESco apoints an arbitrator part wories me, the maintainer should 
> have a say in this too. There are some people in this community who 
> (unfortunately) mix about as well as fire and water.

1) the arbitrator does not _have_ to be _on_ FESCo
2) I think FESCo would take personal conflicts into account and try to
reasonably appoint a neutral arbitrator.

josh