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

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> 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

OK.  So let's say, for the sake of argument, we create a CVS mirror called 
"fedora-core-community" or some such, out on cvs.fedora.redhat.com.  This 
immediately brings us to tricky question #1:

How do we sync from fedora-core to fedora-core-community, and when?

This question, or some variant of it, is what has led us into the current
endless technical debate.

What's wrong with someone sending a patch to bugzilla saying "this is a 
patch to version foo-13.1.77"?  It may not be as "correct", but it seems 
simpler to me.  It's something we could do *today* with almost no further 
discussion.

> 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.

Not even for people who are likely to be submitting patches?  Seems like a 
fairly select and clueful bunch.

--g

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