Java packages, guidelines, ...

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 01:17:15AM +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> There are a bunch of packages blocking F-GUIDELINES on the ground of being Java 
> packages and the Java guidelines not being finalized. Yet there are another 
> bunch of Java packages which have been in Fedora for years. This is 
> inconsistent and just generally doesn't make sense. If what we have now is good 
> enough for all the existing packages, why wouldn't it be for new ones? And once 
> the guidelines are finalized, the packages can always be fixed to conform to 
> them.

Some packagers are very reluctant to change 'working' specs to become
conformant to new guidelines, so it is better if the guidelines at the time
of the review are as good as possible. For example some merge reviews are 
very hard to do, as packagers don't care about packaging quality. At 
review time they have to care. After that somebody else has to review 
once again and file packaging bugs, it is time consuming and some 
packagers will left the packaging bug sit forever (in general the 
same packagers who don't care themselves about packaging quality and 
need someone to point at them the issues).

If we had good policies to force packagers to conform to new guidelines
it would be right, but we haven't, so we must have maximum coercition at
review time to force careless packagers to care.

--
Pat