fedora-maintainers et al [fab] State of Fedora (a long email)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 07:07:30 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> Jesse Keating schrieb:
> > On Monday 06 November 2006 16:24, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >> The problem is not that there are "still only contributors signed up
> >> there", the problem is that contributors did not get signed up there or
> >> left again after some time/send the traffic to /dev/null now because
> >> there were flamewars or unimportant stuff was discussed.
> >> Site note: To solve this problem Extras requested a moderated,
> >> low-traffic "fedora-maintainers-annouce" list to make it possible to
> >> announce stuff to a all maintainers easily. Core blocked it, warren (in
> >> his function as FESCo member) is discussing this with Jesse currently
> >> (maybe there are some results in between, but nobody told me about).
> > This was discussed between Warren, Jeremy Katz, and myself.  The solution to 
> > the problem is to not create yet another mailing list, its to enforce the 
> > list for the purpose it was meant for.  Announcements most often spawn 
> > discussions (see my announcement re dist-hg), having it span two lists or 
> > dealing with a readonly -> read/write list is bothersome and confusing.
> 
> Well, there are a lot of people in Extras land that are not interested
> in the discussions. They only want the announcements. I'm strongly
> inclined to do it just for Extras if Core doesn't want to participate.
> Well, we'll discuss it in the next FESCo meeting.

Looking at the fedora-maintainers list archives, it does not become clear
at all what the purpose [and target group] of that list is and what its
content guidelines are.

Clearly a lot of the content on that list since May 2005 cannot be
considered a required reading by *all* Fedora maintainers. And please,
don't just ask "For example?", but skim over the archives yourself.

Adding to that, after it had been said that all Fedora Extras package
maintainers get subscribed to the list automatically and that subscription
is mandatory, this has not become true. It is not even clear whether all
Core maintainers are subscribed to the list. Effectively, there is no way
to address *all* maintainers and no way either to address all Extras
maintainers, because fedora-extras-list is avoided like the plague by
[probably many] Extras packagers due to past review-traffic madness.

Apart from that, commenting on messages to fedora-extras-commits becomes
inconvienient and inefficient, because its "Reply-To:" to
fedora-extras-list at redhat.com is the wrong target as the packager might
not be subscribed there.

[...]

The purpose of fedora-test-list has always been questionable, but previous
comments about it have only fallen on deaf ears. The list summary says:
"For testers of Fedora Core development releases" which overlaps with the
description of fedora-devel-list. But first of all, it merges official
Test Releases and Rawhide and also adds announcements for Test Updates for
stable releases of FC. Plus, there are lists internal to Red Hat which are
preferred by Core maintainers over fedora-devel-list, because the s/n ratio
on fedora-devel-list is disliked.