closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:16:22 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> On 08.01.2008 22:53, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > Perhaps one option would be for non-programmer packagers to team up with
> > a programmer/sponsor to take on the task of package maintenance? 
> 
> Don't put more bureaucracy or hurdles in the way. That won't scale and
> will frustrate people and some will feel a second-class citizen

Not just that, it is completely unrealistic to hope that there would be
enough volunteers to fill the "programmer/sponsor" role. As soon as a
package has found a packager for Fedora, it already becomes hard to find a
second person with interest in either co-packaging it or taking it
over. One can observe Fedora users building [large] software from source
tarballs as soon as a package in Fedora is not the latest version or
causes a problem, but they don't consider becoming Fedora Contributors to
join a team that oversees the same software in packages. Becoming a
packager is not attractive enough when there are many requirements (such
as policies and procedures) and obligations. And those, who have the
technical capabilities (in particular, knowledge of the relevant APIs and
inner-workings of the packaged software itself) either are active upstream
already or are occupied with other work/interests.

> What
> IMHO would be good instead of what you outline: groups of people (SIGs)
> a package-monkey can contact if he needs help to fix or improve
> something needs programming skills.

Is it necessary to increase complexity of the Fedora Project's structure
by adding lots of small SIGs like that? The Wiki pages are really
troublesome already because it has become increasingly difficult to
navigate in them and find what you are looking for. Additionally, there's
still the problem of over-complex page layout, such as pseudo-menus that
use tables and include files. I'd rather suggest that packagers request
assistance on fedora-devel-list or via some keyword/feature in bugzilla.