Fedora Extras is extra

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:51:08 -0500, William M. Quarles <quarlewm at jmu.edu> wrote:
>
> I look at any duplication of effort, to package the same packages in
> different locations as competition for manpower. I believe the entire
> process is manpower limited, and I believe it is wise to reduce the
> amount of manpower used on inter-repo regression testing and use it
> for other things.

Why don't you start lowering the manpower by automating stuff and allow 
people to play along. Even if I would submit _all_ my packages today 
(which I can't because of policy reasons of fedora.us and because the 
limited scope of fedora.us) it would not be technical feasible.

The day I do that, the QA queue of fedora.us will be 4x as big as it is 
now and it will take a long time for these packages to even hit the 
repository (if ever).

I wouldn't be able to update or add new packages because of the overhead 
that is demanded of me by the policies and procedures that currently lack 
any automation or infrastructure.

There is a reason why there still aren't any FC3 packages. I don't want to 
pressure Red Hat and I think this thread is not worth everyone's time 
spend. But don't give the impression that I'm not willing to cooperate or 
that it is possible to add packages today, because it simply is NOT.

First work on the infrastructure before you add voluntary manpower, 
otherwise you're effectively wasting manpower and potentially ruining a 
community project. It currently does not scale, tools are missing.


> Disagreements at this level come down to priorities,
> resource allocation and priorities. While there is always a place for
> divergence and duplicated effort.. as a generator for innovation and
> experimentation. I see no reason to spend the man-power to encourage a
> mainline process that makes duplication of effort as central approach
> to mainstream package distribution and maintaince.

Look, we've effectively zero'd all duplication effort by simplying sharing 
and merging our SPEC files and SPEC development. 4 repositories now are no 
longer developing their own stuff. They only build the same stuff because 
we're still in a transit phase. ZERO duplication in less than a week 
after Fosdem. No magic powder was necessary.

And having a single subversion makes it very cheap to work towards the 
same policies regarding SPEC file management, because everyone can *see* 
what other people are doing, things are discussed openly and coherency is 
established almost instantly.

So there are other ways to get rid of wasted manpower than aiming for the 
ideal, utopic goal. You can take a shortcut, but it may take you longer to 
actually get somewhere.

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]