new RPM version and Feature process (was: Re: Heads-up: brand new RPM version about to hit rawhide)
Thorsten Leemhuis
fedora at leemhuis.info
Wed Jul 9 18:12:58 UTC 2008
On 09.07.2008 12:51, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> At long last, we are about to get a brand new RPM version (alpha snapshot
> at the moment) into rawhide. The list of changes from 4.4.2.x is massive
> and a full summary needs a separate posting (will follow as time permits),
> this is just a heads-up of immediate consequences for Fedora packagers and
> rawhide consumers:
Sounds great, thanks Panu and others! Much appreciated and looked
forward to.
But this announcement made me wondering: We have a big and complicated
Feature process [1] in Fedora that keeps a whole lot of people and
committees (especially FESCo) busy. Afaics the new RPM version is
something that can be considered a "feature" [2]. It was afaics not
approved yet by FESCO [3] or even proposed [4]. I would expect going
backwards to an older RPM in rawhide later will be next to impossible or
very very hard. IOW: once it's in rawhide for a few days FESCO kind of
has no other chance then to approve this feature, in case it ever comes
up for a Feature vote in a FESCo meeting.
So is the most of the Feature process (and especially FESCo's approval)
useless overhead? It looks to me that the answer tends to be "yes" as
long as big features like this can easily creep in without going through
the established approval process, as long as the feature gets added to
rawhide early enough in the devel cycle.
Just wondering. No, I really don't want to stop the new RPM; there are
likely other examples (say OpenOffice 3.0) in rawhide (but going
backwards there as hard as with RPM). But I'm more and more wondering if
the complex Feature process is worth all the trouble and effort. The
best thing that came out of it in F9 IMHO were the good release notes
and great "whats new" pages. But I'd say we can have that easier.
CU
knurd
[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy
[2]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy#Definition_of_a_Feature
[3]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:AcceptedFedora10
[4]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:ProposedFedora10
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CategoryProposedFeature
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