FESCo Meeting Summary for 2007-09-06

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:06:19 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 23:50 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 <at> freenet.de> writes:
> > > [1] IMO, this FESCO decision is a fault and mistake, we all will regret.
> > > It molests maintainers with long term development babbling and molests
> > > "application developers" with "bureaucracy of Fedora package
> > > maintenance" - It's not helpful to both parties.
> > 
> > Well, the biggest problem with -maintainers was that it was only postable 
> > through on subscription (which also kept people from using tools like the GMane 
> > NNTP and web interfaces) and that subscription was essentially limited to 
> > existing maintainers (which kept not only the random users out, but even people 
> > with legitimate content to post).
> Yes, it had been a closed list and maintainers did get automatically
> subscribed to it - The FESCO of the time this was decided, this approach
> wise - I never did - But THEM decided otherwise.

The idea and rationale behind fedora-maintainers was good and wise.
But it was based on the assumption of starting with low traffic and
messages relevant to package maintainers. Instead, fedora-maintainers
list has been "abused" as some sort of new fedora-devel list with lots
of lengthy general discussions not specifically relevant to package
maintainers. IMO the justification for keeping that content on a
separate list was gone.

> Now, at least I will very likely miss essential postings, because they
> get swapped away in all the "*-ng, x11.R8, kernel-*, ubuntu has "a
> bigger one" babbling ... THEM have decided. 

They should learn to copy essential posts to the moderated announce
lists or directly to the contributors via private mail.

Mandatory subscription of a list with lengthy threads and
controversies (e.g. the completely inappropriate codenames discussion)
simply does not work, as the package maintainers feel the need to
escape from such madness. But to make them not miss announcements
and important posts, somebody needs to decide on what's "essential"
and what is not.