Sponsorship process

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 10:30 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> First of all thanks to FESco for trusting me and making me a sponsor.
> With that said, I just started reading
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SponsorProcess

Looks like the page is need of a few tweaks :-)

> And I have some questions, according to this page a new contributer
> should send a mail to the list: "Note that they should also have sent
> mail to fedora-extras-list with a package which they are proposing to add."
> 
> But according to:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Contributors
> 
> The introductionary mail we used to have no longer is needed and indeed
> I haven't seen any of those mails in a long time.
> 
> Also according to:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SponsorProcess
> 
> The way to find people to sponsor is through the Fedora Account system,
> however there are currently only 2 people listed there, one who doesn't
> have a bugzilla account, atleast not with the mail address in the
> account system and the other who does have a bugzilla account, but 0 FE
> bugzilla activity. I was amazed by this since one of the reasons for me
> asking to become a sponsor is because of Fedora Status mails saying that
> the needs sponsor queue was ever growing.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken the proper way to find people needing sponsors is to
> look at the FE-NEEDSPONSOR tracker bug:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177841

Yes, I would agree there. In fact, the Contributors page only tells
people to get a Fedora Account after their package has been approved.

The Contributors page also tells the submitter to mention that they need
sponsoring, but doesn't mention adding the FE-NEEDSPONSOR tracker bug,
so some submitters won't have done this.

> Also this bug says: "SPONSORS: when you accept the responsibility of
> reviewing a package, please take it off of this list." Shouldn't this be
> on: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Contributors instead / too.
> 
> I have the feeling that currently not everybody is doing this (taken
> package review needing sponsors of the list when they have started the
> review). See for example:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177106

I'm not sure that this is the right thing to do anyway, at least not
until some way through the review process. When I review a package from
a new submitter, one of the things I'm looking for is their
responsiveness to feedback, and I also try to see what other activity
they may have on other mailing lists etc., to get a feel for whether I'm
comfortable sponsoring them or not. During the review process, I may
decide that I'm not comfortable sponsoring this particular submitter,
(though I'd probably not change the blocker from FE-NEW to FE-REVIEW
before making that decision).

Another change I'd suggest is to:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Contributors

There is a section on mailing lists to join, after which it says:

Read Other Submissions
Read some other package submissions to learn about packaging and gain
familiarity with the process and requirements. 

I'd add to this that joining the read-only fedora-package-review mailing
list (not included in the aforementioned section on mailing lists) is a
good way to see the process in action for other submissions.

Paul.