"community maintainers working on core" dilemma (was: Re: [fab] rant: why does it take so long to prepare a firefox update for FC5?)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Greg DeKoenigsberg schrieb:
> On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> Further: How could Red Hat help? *Red Hat should ask for help in 
>> situations like this!* There are a lot of people around in 
>> Extras/Fedora-land that are willing to help in situations like this, but 
>> probably nobody is going to step up without a external trigger. We are 
>> used to @redhat-maintainers that take care of their packages on their own.
> +1.
> So let's ask this question: why are we not making more progress on the 
> "community maintainers working on core" dilemma?
> 
> The answer, from where I sit: we're bogged down in technical details.

Agreed.

[...]
> The next question, then: what processes can we put in place that will
> allow trusted community developers to submit patches in a "fast track"  
> way, such that the official RH maintainer can simply take a quick look,
> rebuild, and release?

My preferred variant:

1. community developer commits his changes to a version control system
somewhere
2. he sends some kind of pull request to the red hat maintainer
3. red hat maintainer looks at the changes
3a) he doesn't like them -- he mails the community maintainer some
reasons why he doesn't like them
3b) he likes them -- he pulls them and queues build

> It could be as simple as adding a keyword to bugzilla.

"bugzilla != simple" for a lot of people.

CU
thl