about maintainers and packagemonkeys (was: Re: rpms/ocsinventory-client/devel ocsinventory-client.spec, 1.7, 1.8)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 04.05.2007 11:08, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 01:34 -0400, Remi Collet wrote:
>> +# This requires dmidecode (at run time) which is only available on x86.
>> +ExcludeArch: ppc ppc64 s390 s390x ia64 
> To use ExcludeArch, you MUST have a bug filed an on the
> FE-ExcludeArch-ppc tracker (and FE-ExcludeArch-ppc64 now too, I
> suppose).

+1

> But the correct fix in this case is to make the use of dmidecode
> optional, and perhaps to look elsewhere for the information you wanted
> from it. Just disabling an architecture is the packagemonkey approach.
> Fedora needs _maintainers_ not packagemonkeys.

My 2 cent: Fedora needs both maintainers and packagemonkeys (as you call
them).

Packagemonkeys (and in my interpretation of the term) can do lots of
good work IMHO:

- package apps
- update them now and then
- making sure they work well
- look at bugs
- fix the trivial bugs
- forward bugs upstream

E.g. they can do relative easy kind of maintenance work without even
know a programming language. Thus they are helpful for the project as a
whole and can do some "easy tasks" while real "maintainers" with more
skills can concentrate on the stuff that harder to fix or realize.

In the end we might have an overall better distro with lots of packages.
And with a bit of luck a lot of packagemonkeys become real maintainers
over time.

CU
thl

P.S.:Packagemonkey sounds bad and we should not use the term IMHO.
Anyway, just in case anyone wonders: I consider myself as a package
monkey, as I never found time to learn programming properly :-/