FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-03-20

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 02:52:26AM +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 
> 
> > Why are we waiting months? Why aren't people helping finalize
> > guidelines? Because there is no incentive to do so? 
> 
> The only thing this resolution is an incentive for is not to mention guidelines 
> at all, even in passing, in order not to "give" FPC "ideas", i.e. the exact 
> opposite of what you're aiming at.

I don't really get it. There are many people in favor of blocking
packages until a guideline is done (at least I am, until it becomes
easier to force a packager to fix his package post import), they will 
report to FESCO when the packaging of a kind of packages is a mess (as 
it was for java packages).
 
> > Once packages have entered the collection it is MUCH harder to change
> > them and make them conform to a good packaging guidelines. 
> 
> Then that's the real problem to solve. Guidelines will always change. Even the 
> generic ones change, see e.g. License tags. 

It is the real issue, true. And it should be solved. But until it is solved,
and if FESCO doesn't abuse this possibility of blocking packages because
of a missing guideline, at least it will reduce the amount of packages
to fix afterward because either some packagers don't care about quality
and do very rapid reviews, or do sophisticated things but incompatible
with other sophisticated packaging practices (the first being, in my
experience the most frequent one).
 
> The current "solution" of holding up packages until everything's all set is the 
> exact opposite of the "release early, release often" principle which is so 
> common in Free Software (and in particular in the bazaar-style "Open Source 
> development model") and which is supposed to be part of Fedora's objectives.

Part of fedora objective is also best quality in packaging. I don't know
if it is written somewhere, though.

--
Pat