Heads-up: python 2.5 on its way

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 12/11/06, Tom Lane <tgl at redhat.com> wrote:
> Mebbe I shouldn't stick my neck out here, but: as long as I've been at
> Red Hat, it's been OK for any package maintainer to force a rebuild of
> someone else's dependent package.

Its a brave new world in Extras. A brave new world full of community
personalities and opinions not constrained by the soul-sucking inertia
of a delineated management structure, nor bound together by the
anti-boat-tipping/anti-bridge-burning forces of a steady paycheck from
a common green and lush oasis.  So while there maybe a rational
consensus with regard to good Samaritan best effort, I will always be
wary of running into that one contributor who dissents.  As much as I
love mailinglist bloodsport and a host of other forms of metaphorical
violence, I don't want to have to engage in such activities with such
frequency that my tastes for them are dulled.

We really haven't made it a requirement that contributors signoff on
the whole, "I won't be an ass if someone else goes in and fixes
trivial crap for me" concept. We should do that, we really need to
have a "I won't be an ass" creed to go along with the "I won't be
evil" creed.  Make it as explicit as we can as to where the boundary
of personal control is versus shared control over the codebase.

And fined grained access control, is just going to make this sort of
crap harder to deal with in the future... because then you'll have to
identify those people with masterkeys to the cvs and they will be the
ones expected to clear this sort of poopage up. Instead of making it
easy for those of us with time to fix the trivial breakages. Because
from release cycle to release cycle, different people will have the
spare time to run point for these issues, and you'll be hard pressed
to predict who those people are two months ahead of time.  And no,
I've absolutely no desire to be tapped as one of the poor suckers with
wide access in the fine-grained access control future.


-jef"I find a 5 minute shouting match is an effective an areobic
excercise as 10 minutes of jogging"spaleta