[VERY LONG] The fonts SIG irregular status report: Fedora 11 state

[Ville Skyttä]

On Saturday 20 June 2009, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> — FPC and FESCO were very late in reviewing and approving new packaging
> guidelines. Also, FPC requested last-minute changes in font package
> naming. That caused a lot of confusion in the first months of the Fedora
> 11 cycle. Packagers that anticipated new guidelines had to rework their
> packaging (sometimes, with fallout in other packages). Packagers that
> waited for the final guidelines publication lost many weeks resulting in
> an activity peak just before Fedora 11 freezes.
>
> — many packagers didn't act on the guidelines change, or exhausted
> scarce support resources by being frankly uncooperative².

Pointing fingers at everyone else isn't going to help.  Just my personal 
experience:

I luckily package only a very few things that contain or depend on font 
packages.  I was one of those who adjusted my packaging several times as they 
changed and tried to keep up with many changes already before this effort 
started.  For example:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477478
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480477

When I mentioned that I have no time to keep up with the changes and asked the 
reporter to go ahead and fix the issues himself several times, all I got was 
things that look like mass replies (again pretty much just blaming others) and 
not even a comment whether the reported intends to help out or not.  
Eventually the "not" alternative became quite evident and I managed to find 
time to sort things out once more.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01087.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01090.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-January/msg01142.html

Asking (in a very annoyed tone, not surprisingly) on fedora-devel the same 
people to take responsibility and to start actually (meaning as in "show me 
the patches") helping out with implementing the changes, I get greeted with 
what I think are plain unjustified insults (see 2nd link above), and when 
replying to those (3rd link above) and pointing out why I think those were 
unjustified and incorrect, there was no reply (again == not admitting any 
failure, not a hint of an apology), and now we get to hear again why the 
failures/rough edges were someone else's fault.

> — it would be nice to see more activity on the SIG mailing list. People
> do participate in the SIG and package fonts, but it happens almost
> exclusively in private mails, bugzilla and IRC. If people have ideas on
> how to revive the list, please post them³ to <fedora-fonts-list at
> redhat.com> (you may need to subscribe).

No more lists, thanks; I'll just post my .02€ here for the last time on this 
subject: It wouldn't have taken more than dropping the arrogance and adding 
something like "Sorry, we messed up by pushing changes too early and not 
having enough resources around to help people out in the first place and 
especially at the late stages of the churn, and will try to do better in the 
future.  Thanks to everyone affected for your patience." in this report 
instead of continuing to blame FPC, FESCO and packagers for problems to start 
making this SIG look like a responsible group again, making it more likely 
that packagers are more willing to work with you and perhaps some will become 
actual active resources for the SIG's continuing/future work.