What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 09:06:17AM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> These are a pretty reasonable start to a set of guidelines to help users
> determine when and what to push as updates.

I think that it is already pretty good in:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/MaintainerResponsibility#Maintain_stability_for_users
though I don't know what is the approval status of this document.
In general I think that
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/MaintainerResponsibility
is well balanced and gives a taste of what are the best practices
without being too binding. 

Problem is that those practices are at odd with what many maintainers do, 
they don't care about regressions or even don't fix bugs, nor ask for 
help and don't consider patches. They don't help fixing other packages 
before they hit stable.

> I think one of the big problems we have is new maintainer training, and
> lack of guidelines like the above.  We just expect them to "figure it
> out" and we shouldn't be surprised when something goes wrong.

I don't think the most problematic updates are those from new
maintainers, the problematic ones are those corresponding with packages
that are used by other packages (non leave packages), or leave packages 
with significant user base, and those are not maintained by new
maintainers.

That being said I think that inded the policies part of the wiki 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy
should be up to date, and as easy to read as possible, and should
contain
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/MaintainerResponsibility
and indeed new maintainers should read those, but new maintainers rarely
break fedora.

--
Pat