Fedora Project Board Recap 2008-07-29

[Jason Tibbitts]

Paul W. Frields wrote:
> == Package Reviews (NEW) ==
> * Board wants to ensure FESCo is driving interest in package reviews

Please note that I still intend to set up a package review SIG, but note 
also that I did not run for FESCo election this cycle (i.e. I'm no 
longer on FESCo as of last week) and am still on vacation in the 
furthest reaches of Norway for the better part of another week.

> ** Queue is very lengthy, over 800 packages at last count

The report at http://fedoraproject.org/PackageReviewStatus/NEW.html 
gives a reasonable queue size, since it doesn't count unreviewable 
packages (either those which are marked as being not ready or those 
which depend on other packages which have yet to be reviewed, at least 
for the cases where the ticket dependencies are set up properly).  I see 
that the queue has gotten a good bit larger over the last week or so; it 
seems that we have had another Java package bomb.

One interesting thing to note about this page is the set of tickets 
marked in green; these are from contributors who require sponsorship. 
Being somewhat out of touch I do not know how far the maintainer 
containment work has come, but I know that work is ongoing to alter our 
systems and procedures to make it simpler to get those contributors 
sponsored.

Also note that the majority of that report is still comprised of merge 
reviews, which have a different set of associated problems.  Three that 
come to mind are:
1) the difficulty of keeping a person who is still responsible for the 
ticket CC'd,
2) the tickets were opened by nobody and assigned to nobody, so they 
don't show up in any report that the package maintainer might generally 
run, and
3) since the packages are already in the distro, there's no real drive 
for anyone to actually respond to merge review commentary even if the 
proper people are CC'd on the ticket.

The first can be handled by someone digging into the packagedb and 
updating CC lists, although that sounds a bit painful.  Perhaps we could 
leverage the new pkg-owner stuff for that and #2 as well (if we have a 
way to change the opener of a ticket) but I don't know now feasible that 
is a this point.

I cannot offer additional suggestions on #3.  Either we (and by that I 
mean one of the committees I'm not on) need to officially de-prioritize 
merge reviews or figure out how to improve maintainer response.

> # ACTION :: Paul - Request contributor to produce statistics for review
> queue on a regular basis in Fedora Weekly news

This could be handled by the SIG once its up and running.

> # ACTION :: Karsten - On Docs team, drive priority wiki gardening of the
> packaging and package review guidelines to make contributor uptake
> easier

I certainly can't argue with that.  Such documentation is not my forte 
although once the SIG is running we can hope to have someone willing to 
work with the docs team on this.

  - J<