The community has lost control... (Was: Re: Don't put new packages through updates-testing)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 02.06.2007 19:56, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>> "TL" == Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> writes:
> 
> TL> Okay, we wanted the merge.
> Yes, we did.  You and I sat in the same meetings at the same
> conference

Yes. And we all expected it would be a bumpy merge, but well, it was
much more bumpy then I had expected...

> and for my part I can't say that what we have now is
> fundamentally any different than what was promised to us.

No. But the way we got it was the problem. It was much to hectic.

>  Yes, we're
> not all of the way there, and unfortunately a release complicated
> matters,

Yes, I'm aware of it. That why I wrote 'let make "contributing to
Fedora easy again, get the community involved better into the decisions
process and make packagers happy again" one of the most important
"Features" for Fedora 8. Otherwise the merge might fail in the end.' in
my mail.

> but I simply don't see any of the negative shifts away from
> the community that I keep seeing complaints about.

Well, see all those discussion that happened when ACLs were added, kjoi
introduced, the freezes were introduced and bodi put in place. Sure,
there are always discussions, but all those were quite worse and there
was a lot of confusion afaics... Don't read fedora-maintainers for a
week and suddenly you are not aware of how to build or push a package.

Further: I don't blame the current situation is FESCo's fault (¹,²) --
there were afaics a lot of things that went wrong over the past months
in different areas of Fedora. Some things just happened and if there
would have been more time then many things likely would have worked out
better.

But as far as I can see there are lot's of people unhappy with some of
the things in the past months. Just see the discussions on
fedora-maintainers when ACLs in CVS were introduced, koji enabled,
freezes happened and bodhi was enabled.

Sure, only some people participate in those discussion (often the same
ones). But a lot of people in the past weeks told me in private (via
ICQ, Jabber, IRC, mail and on FUDCOn at LinuxTag now) that they were quite
unhappy with the recent happenings.

I assume most of them will say "okay, we wanted the merge". But the hard
part is now done -- so let's try to work better now to make contributors
happy again, as we need them.

CU
thl

(¹) -- and I'm not even sure it would have been much different if I
would still have been in FESCo. I would have yeeled loudly here and
there, but well, time was pressing quite hard

(²) -- especially as even now it's still unclear what parts the Board
and FESCo are responsible for and how both groups interact with groups
like the release tea