Submission process (was: Re: Self-Introduction: Michael Tiemann)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 14:52:03 -0400, Erik LaBianca wrote:

> [...] although I believe the current system is still daunting
> for a new packager or reviewer. I'm not sure how to make it less so
> without compromising quality other than saying that people need to just
> jump in, and ask for help on the list if needed. 

Yes, more people are encouraged to help and work towards becoming trusted
developers. If there are questions about the general process, I'm one of
those who accept private mail, too.

Don't worry about "compromising quality". There is the "unstable"
repository (_and_ still the "testing" repository). As soon as a package
builds successfully and the source tarball has been confirmed as being
released by the upstream project, a package could go into "unstable".

It's just that for every piece of software, which has a target group,
there should be at least one person who would team up with the packager
and say a package is ready to be published and e.g. provide the info on
where it is included in another big distribution (let's say Debian,
Mandrake, SuSE) already. Else people, who are not familiar with the
software and who are not interested in it either, would need to spend time
on it, and time is a major resource problem.

> Would there be some benefit to having a separate list for Extra's
> discussion?

Depends on Red Hat's commitment. As long as fedora.us takes the role of a
3rd party repository with only semi-official backing, not much will
change. You can see in this thread that potential package
developers/maintainers are waiting for official Fedora Extras, because
they hope that things will change a lot and e.g. fedora.us QA could be
avoided.

> Nonetheless, we really need to have a build environment that's >easily<
> available for prospective packagers and QA testers to build packages on.

With the current build system, failed build attempts would not be an issue
if the build team did consist of more people. That can only become true if
they shift some of their current activities and, for instance, they don't
need to approve updates by trusted maintainers.