simplistic questions about core/extras merge

Max Spevack mspevack at redhat.com
Mon Feb 12 12:02:55 UTC 2007


Hi guys,

Hopefully a lot of what I bring up in this email is redundant, and you can 
just point me to the right places.

My goal today is to get an email written up for our *internal* developers, 
but that is also able to be shown to external developers, that explains 
exactly what they need to do for Fedora 7.  I know that Bill has taken a 
stab at this before, and it led to a really long thread on one of our 
internal lists.  I think we need to follow up with that, so I'm hoping 
that I can use this list as a place to get the email drafted up, and then 
from there I can send it to some engineering managers within Red Hat, and 
also to the developers who they manage.

The audience is 3 types of people:

1) Internal RH developers who already contribute actively to Fedora.

2) Internal RH developers who like the Fedora 7 idea, but haven't yet had 
time to get Fedora accounts and start thinking about what Fedora 7 means 
for them.  In reality, that won't change much until after RHEL5 goes out.

3) Internal RH developers who don't pay much attention to Fedora at all, 
aside from what they are "forced" to do.

========

So let's look at the process for a single package, making its way from 
"Core" to "New World":

1) Package is reviewed under the current Fedora guidelines.  As these 
reviews happen, the guidelines that we have are always up for intelligent 
discussion.

2) Once a package passes review, a couple of things have to happen
 	a) Current maintainer (someone who is @redhat.com) needs to agree 
to a freeze.
 	b) Current maintaner needs to get a Fedora account.
 	c) Package's "upstream" is moved from internal CVS and build 
system to external CVS and build system (basically Extras)
 	d) Current maintainer decides if anyone else should have 
"maintainer" ACLs at this time
 	e) Development resumes

Is that basically the right model?  Am I forgetting any major concerns 
that have previously been voiced?  What steps am I missing?

I have a few other questions too:

1) What is the process for new folks being given "maintainer" access to a 
package that is in the New World?  I think it's simply a matter of the 
current maintainer saying so, and the proper access being given in CVS? 
But *who* is the person/persons who actually makes that happen?

2) What are we going to call the new repo, from the /etc/yum.repos.d/ 
perspective?  In fact, my larger question is "what will f7's 
fedora-release package look like?

3) How are we going to deal with the worst case scenario, which is 
packages that fail review, or for which the current @redhat.com maintainer 
doesn't do anything to help prepare for the merge?

=====

My understanding is that for F7Test1, Jesse basically just manually pulled 
together the packages that went into the Desktop spin from wherever they 
currently happened to live -- Core or Extras.  And that's a fine hack for 
the time being, but hopefully we will see less and less of that as F7-GOLD 
gets closer.

Ok, comment, flame me, tell me how I'm out of touch and all of this is 
already spelled out somewhere that I just haven't seen.  :-)

--Max

-- 
Max Spevack
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