Draft: simple update description guidelines

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 00:00 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > It appears, most maintainers only have been ignoring the description
> > fields or not filling them properly because of lack of documentation or
> > awareness on how it is being used.
> 
> Some of the replies in these threads don't quite suggest that. People
> complain about the "bureaucracy" of being "forced" to write such stuff,
> which pretty much shows they intentionally do not want to fill in those
> fields and won't do it if they can get away without it.

If you assume good faith, you might interpret people's opinions as:

  - This doesn't help users, they just blindly apply updates anyway

  - Users who do read the update description have the ability to go 
    read the upstream changelog themselves

  - This will be a lot of manual work for maintainers

  - This could be done automatically

  - This is just yet another attempt by misguided people to turn Fedora 
    into a bureaucratic minefield

I don't fully agree with any of those points, but I can understand where
they come from.

You won't change those opinions with a set of "you MUST do foo" rules.
This is not a technical matter which you can come up with a black and
white policy for. We need package maintainers who exercise their own
good judgement and the flip-side of that is we must *allow* maintainers
to exercise their own judgement.

Each of the sections in the draft:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Markmc/Draft_package_update_guidelines

begin with a "user's perspective". If package maintainers take that
perspective on board and read the suggestions that follow, I think we'll
end up with a better situation than we're in now without permanently
alienating anyone in the process.

Cheers,
Mark.