Summary of the 2008-04-08 Packaging Committee meeting

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Jason Corley wrote:
>>     [12:33] <spot> jpackage is no more of an upstream than Fedora is.
>>
>> Yes. JPackage isn't upstream for the Tomcat software, and neither is Fedora.
> 
> We are, however, upstream for your Tomcat RPMS, a distinction you seem
> incapable of grasping sadly.  Patches to Tomcat's code base should
> clearly go to the ASF.
> 
And why are the jpackage tomcat RPMS upstream for our RPMS?  It seems 
quite plain from the changelog you quoted that they are not.

>> How wonderful it is, when quotes are taken out of context. :)
> 
> You mean like how you removed the part of my email where I pointed out
> PACKAGING bugfixes that were never submitted back to the package
> authors at JPackage?

Replied to that email that these logs seem to prove the opposite.


There's no Packaging Guidelines or FESCo policies that specify that 
JPackage is the upstream for Fedora java packages.  So there is nothing 
to separate tomcat from any other package that was submitted to review 
in Fedora, was packaged for a time, orphaned, and is presently being 
well maintained by a fedora contributor.  If the contributor chooses to 
watch how other distributions are packaging the software, they can do 
so.  If they don't, they do not have to.

JPackage and Fedora are currently both competitors and collaborators. 
In some ways and some cases JPackage provides packages that Fedora 
consumes but in other cases and other ways JPackage and Fedora provide 
packages that have some overlap between them.

Some maintainers are involved in both projects and the guidelines at 
both projects allow the packages to be built for both with little or no 
change.  Other maintainers are involved with Fedora but are utilizing 
the work done at JPackage to help make better packages -- they would 
hopefully be feeding that information back to JPackage but there's no 
policy mandating this (just as we don't have a policy mandating constant 
dialogue with Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, ATRPMs, etc).  Still other 
maintainers treat their packages as they would any non-java package by 
maintaining the packaging while upstream maintains the source code (this 
seems to be the case with present-day tomcat).

Does there need to be a stronger connection between Fedora and JPackage 
with a policy?  Something that states that all Fedora java packages must 
be in JPackage first and be based off of them?  The results of this 
discussion will probably influence that.  Once again, though, that's a 
shift in policy that needs to be decided on by FESCo.  The choice to 
give JPackage a different status than other third-party repositories 
needs to be made at that level and Packaging Guidelines will then need 
to be adapted where appropriate.

-Toshio