Dear Fesco: Orphan package process needs work

[Ville Skyttä]

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 14:58 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:

> If a package doesn't get a fair chance to be picked up before dropped,
> I'd say that's broken.

While dropping [0] may be a bit rough, personally I think it worked well
as a trigger for someone to actually step up in the NetworkManager-vpnc
case.

> Or, if an auxiliary process such as mass rebuilding gets free reign 
> to ignore other processes, then that is broken.

Agreed, but I don't think that's what has happened.  The rebuild time
slot length was intentionally aligned with the maintainer AWOL policy
definitions.  Some planned post-rebuild/release-preparation actions were
actually loosened for a bunch of packages that were orphaned too late
when comparing the time we generally reserve for orphaned package
takeover to the time we had left until the FC6 release.  The time
between orphaning not-taken-care-of packages and removing their package
files from the repo could have been a bit longer, but aggressively
cleaning up orphans this way from devel has been done pretty much all
the time anyway.  Remove early, remove often in devel ;) - that gives
other contributors more time to react before the next release.

Anyway, there's definitely quite a few things we can improve in future
release preparations and all feedback is valuable, thanks!


[0] Even when defined and occurred as "removing only the rpm files from
the development repository according to the plan announced well
beforehand and separately warned about several times on two lists before
it actually took place".