Sponsorship Concerns Re: xfce 4.2.1 packages available

[Warren Togami]

Everyone,
I have spent hours analyzing and fixing Kevin's packages, when the job 
is already supposed to be nearly done at this point.  The changes that 
he made were mostly superficial, and in cases where they were not (like 
xfdesktop below), they were highly problematic or plain wrong.

It is quite clear to me that this guy is unqualified to be maintaining 
these packages without supervision.  But it is not his fault.  *Maybe* 
it would be acceptable if his membership sponsor were educating him 
while watching his activities, but it it seems that spot has been busy 
this week.

It is the responsibility of the sponsor to make sure members below them 
are doing the right thing, and educating them when they are not.  I ask 
that sponsors please be careful not to sponsor too many contributors if 
you are too busy to foster their development and education.

We need to scale the number of contributors who know packaging extremely 
well in order to handle auditing the ever growing quantity of changes 
going into the repository.  Your attention and education of our newer 
members is crucial in making this process scale.


Kevin,
In this case I will work with you to fix the XFCE packages.  I hope that 
you can learn from the changes we make together in order to make cleaner 
packages in the future.  We will start with xfdesktop for now (although 
I suspect we will need to discuss more packages...)

The problems in xfdesktop are too significant for me to fix quickly 
without testing like I had for other packages in CVS.
- Requires: gtk2 >= 2.2.0 is unnecessary, or in the rare case that it is 
you should document it with a comment. [1]
- BuildRequires: gtk2 >= 2.2.0 is wrong, should be gtk2-devel
- removed the fedora splash
- rm -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/xfce4/mcs-plugins/*.a
Usually we don't want to ship these, yet your package adds it again.
Was there any reason in particular?
- %files list uses explicit filenames rather than wildcards
This makes it more difficult to maintain in the future for little 
benefit now.
- completely wiped out than's original changelog
- you removed a several artificial Requires that pulled in various 
components of XFCE.  I am not sure about the original purpose of these 
artificial deps, but I am guessing that they existed in order to install 
xfdesktop and related pieces would be pulled in by deps to make a 
complete environment.
In fixing this, should xfdesktop be the base package that pulls in the 
rest? If so, what packages should it pull in?

I recommend starting again from the FC3 xfdesktop.spec and making 
changes from there.  Don't need to be so verbose in your %changelog 
section, just list the changes that make a functional difference.

Let me know when you have a new xfdesktop for review, and I'll review it 
again.

Thanks,
Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com
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