Housekeeping (Was Re: FE Package Status of Sep 4, 2006)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Christian Iseli schrieb:
> Here is the somewhat overdue package status update...

thx for your work c4chris, mjk and everybody else involved in creating
the reports.

> ----
> FE Package Status of Sep  4, 2006
> 
> The full report can be found here:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/PackageStatus

Well, it's a long list. It might be a bit to long. I'm wondering if we
should split it in separate sections; especially stats should be
separated from problem indicators.

Why? Well, there are a lot of indicators for small or mid-range problems
in there (and some for big ones) that we should solve in an ideal world,
but it seems the maintainers ignore most them.

<dreaming>Maybe more would look at the problems indicators if they would
get a mail from the script "your Name is listed on the newest 'Problem
indicators' report; please fix your stuff or tell us if we hit a false
positive and we won't poke you again"</dreaming>

<rant>
But now let's start the rant and just cherry-pick a few things from the
report that should be fixed in an ideal world but most of then got
ignored instead:

28 Packages not present in the development repo
-> most of them probably should be marked as dead.package in cvs. If
they get re-submitted later they should go though a full review again.

7 packages not available in extras devel but present in release
-> for the em8300{,-kmod} stuff it's understandable at this point of
time. But all of this stuff should be fixed before we branch for FE6.
gaim-gaym doesn't work with gaim 2.0 iirc -> we should announce this
when F{CE}6 ships. Is it in the release notes already?

3 packages which have not yet been FE-APPROVED
-> heck, why?

6 packages present in the development repo which have no entry in
owners.list: "dates BackupPC xcircuit libburn gnustep-make
python-musicbrainz2"
-> heck, we need a group of people (QA SIG?) that make sure that this
list gets down to zero entries most of the time

6 orphaned packages available in extras devel
-> okay, they were orphaned just a few days ago iirc. But I'd sleep much
better if I knew that theres a group of people that watching this list
and makes sure that stuff like this gets removed when there is no
maintainer found after three weeks (but I'm quite sure scop will handle
it for his old packages in this case)

7 packages duplicated for devel:
-> why the heck? Somebody should look at it quickly.

8 accepted, closed packages where I'm unable to find the package in the
development repo
-> hmm, that list in wide areas parts is similar to the "7 packages not
available in extras devel but present in release". Maybe those should be
merged?

8 accepted, closed packages where I'm unable to find the package in the
owners file
-> in wide areas parts is similar to "packages present in the
development repo which have no entry in owners.list". Maybe those should
be merged?

13 accepted, open package reviews where the package appears to already
be in the repo..
 and
1 closed tickets still blocking FE-REVIEW
 and
1 closed tickets still blocking FE-NEW
-> well, not that important, but would be nice to look closer what's
gone wrong here

133 OPEN-BUGS tickets with no activity in eight weeks
-> maybe the script should post automatically post a small note in the
bug there "Hey, I'm and automatic script that runs now and then and I
noticed that there wasn't activity in the past eight weeks. Did you
forget about this bug? Well, no big deal, that happens to everyone now
and then, but please consider this as a reminder to fix this stuff"

11 packages in CVS with no owners entry: BackupPC dates gnustep-make
initng libburn muse php-apc python-musicbrainz2 xcircuit xfsdump zoo
-> can't believe it. In parts similar to "Packages missing in
owners.list" and "8 accepted, closed packages where I'm unable to find
the package in the owners file"

6 packages in CVS devel which appear to have moved to/from Core

Stopping here. I think you know now what I'm up to.
</rant>

As I said, some (most) of the problems from above list are probably not
that harmful. But things like "Duplicated packages in Core and Extras"
(7 packages currently) really makes me nervous and we also should make
sure that all of our packages are listed in owners.list. In gene: We
should be doing our housekeeping-tasks a bit better IMHO.

Action plan: try to get all the important stuff fixed before FE6. The
less important stuff in the eight weeks after that. It'll be a bit of
work, but IMHO worth the effort. After that implement a
scheme/script/process to make sure that all "problem indicators" that
are listed in two reports in a row get attention by somebody that can
poke the right people to get the stuff fixed.

Just my 2 cent. And please note: Yes, I also don't want to many
bureaucratic stuff. But I think a bit is needed to keep everything
straight.

CU
thl