QA process was Re: RPM submission procedure

Karl DeBisschop kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com
Fri Jan 9 22:21:18 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 16:46, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> Karl DeBisschop wrote:
> > If packagers from different distros eschew that tpe of 
> > cooperation, then the developer either sees silence or a "do 
> > things my way because that's our policy" from 20 different camps 
> > pulling the project in all different ways.
> 
> I'm confused..
> Do you want policy and guidelines or a free4all?

I want policy and guidelines. And I would hope they are communicated to
developers, and developed in a way that recognizes there is some value
to congruence with other distros. Not at the expense of any distro's
goals, but forgoing divergence where the benefit is minimal. 

> Because as it stands right I'm not aware of stated guidelines for
> 'community' packaging beyond the efforts at fedora.us and jpackage
> to document a process that other people can pick up and use.

Probably Debian also. 

My experience has been that the more developed the packaging guidelines
are, the more the packager tends to be isolated from the developer. I'd
like to try and resist that sort of isolation.

> What appears to be happening at the moment are a lots of little
> of different ways of packaging are in use...but nobody is actually
> documenting those practices..they are all some form of evolved mess of
> 'this works for us' and 'this is what we are using.'

That is largely true, and I don't see it as a good thing.

> You want to get to a distro agnostic packaging standard...the distros
> need to layout a guidelines for how packaging is being done right now,
> and start making sure their own packages conform to that documented
> system. Then everyone can sit down and compare notes...and start working
> towards a common specification. This is not a working from scratch
> situation...there must be an effort to document the current practices,
> then we can talk about making a best effort attempt at defining a
> comprehensive set of 'best practices'. 

Agreed. I was not trying to say that those practices should not be
documented and solidified. I was just concerned that the OP was
suggesting that process should happen in rigid isolation from other
distros. I think that was a misunderstanding on my part.

> If you are serious about support an agnostic effort than you will
> package for projects that have stated packaging guidelines and shun
> situations that do not make an effort to document how its suppose to
> work.

Agreed. I would also suggest that distros can try to choose policies
that are not needlessly divergent and can try to increase the area of
congruence.

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>
Pearson Education/Information Please





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