Slightly OT: bad rap for Fedora, and realistic effects

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 10:23:39 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

> I think the responsibilities of sponsors are the same as they have
> always been (although no where written down), namely: 

The fact that they are not written down makes it useless.

After several years of using the sponsorship system, we don't even have a
draft somewhere in the Wiki.

Why is that? Because nobody has the time to do it? Or because nobody knows
what the sponsors' responsibilities are actually? Do we use the terms
"sponsor" and "sponsorship" just for fun or because it is a hardcoded
scheme in the FAS? Can we assume that every sponsored contributor is
observed by a sponsor during activities in cvs and bugzilla, for example?
Does that apply also to Red Hat packagers, who should know their stuff,
and blanket approvals? Is sponsorship a *life-time* process? For example,
some of the fellow contributors I've sponsored have been the FESCo chair
or still are FESCo members. Others can be trusted, also with regard to
their technical abilities. How does that affect the person's status in the
FAS and my responsibilities as a sponsor of those people?

> - Fix problems that they cause if mistakes are made and they can't
> figure out how to fix them. 

You know this has become impossible with the ACLs. The original intent of
the Vacation page in the Wiki is void, too. Packagers would need to lift
the acls on all their packagers, before they could allow trusted
contributors to help out during vacation.

> - Revoke sponsorship in the event that the person refuses to follow
> rules, and deal with that persons leftover packages. 

The second part is new to me. Leftover packages would be orphaned.
 
> - koji = fork of brew blessed by the lawyers and available for Fedora
> use

The source code smelled like that, but relevant lists don't mention koji
with a single word.

> - Updates system - No idea where that is... it is still not finished
> from what I know. Perhaps someone else could fill this in? 

I know where it is, I am subscribed to the Wiki page, too, but there is
some secret relationship between it and what is used at Red Hat.  Smells a
bit like another fork/semi-rewrite of an existing code base, which creates
a situation like "aha, somebody is working on transfering more and more
existant code piece by piece, so it's just matter of time before all of it
is published".

> > * unclear role of FESCo, not enough steering -- instead: the drive
> > that "you don't need to be in FESCo to get something done",
> 
> What items do you think need addressing? 

Guiding the community to prepare for Fedora 7. The contributor community
needs a roadmap. There are 1129 fc6 packages (based on their src.rpm name)
in the devel tree, while Core has reached test2 already. The upgradecheck
report lists several invalid upgrade paths. The broken deps report lists
other issues. The FE7Target tracker lists even more issues. And I
guarantee, more issues are undiscovered.