best practices for updates in stable releases (was: Re: OpenOffice 3.1)

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:49:22AM -0500, Jud Craft wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 13:03 +0200, Matej Cepl wrote:
> > Suggestions on how to "enforce" ?
> 
> Lock out developers who don't follow guidelines?  Sanction them?
> Remove their ability to push updates?
> 
> No sass meant, I just figured that was a strange rhetorical question.
> Does Fedora really not have any ability to enforce its own guidelines?

In general, no. Maintainers from the community are benevolent and aren't 
bound by a contract. Also some people @RH don't seem to feel obliged that 
much by fedora policies. I guess that @RH managers could do something then,
but only if they think that those fedora policies are to be followed, and
my guess is that, in some RH teams, the updating policy is not viewed
as relevant.

FESCo is something like an authority that can ask for sanctions, but 
will rarely do so.

There are some places where some interaction happens, and some checks of
guidelines, are possible, like in reviews. Also some specific cases
have policies (missing maintainer, who is allowed to change other people 
packages). But in general maintainers are free to do whatever they want
in their packages.

In fact I think that it is a good thing, except when bugs are not fixed,
even though the bug reporter provided with a fix.

--
Pat