Summary from yesterdays (mini) FESCo meeting

[Callum Lerwick]

On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 22:57 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> They learn best from submitting packages, from applying the guidelines to
> their own packages, and from trying to review packages. This is what they
> do once they maintain their package in CVS on their own without any peer
> reviewing. They cannot learn from a brief list of YES/NO answers or
> MUST/SHOULD items. Example:

The problem with this, is in reality this can not scale. Not everyone
can submit and maintain packages. And people busy maintaining packages
don't tend to be interested or have the time to do reviews. Hell, I'll
admit that personally, I signed up to package stuff. Not to do reviews.
(I think I squeezed in just before the "must review other people's
packages" policy solidified and makes me feel a bit like I got in easy,
but hopefully I've made up for that by now.) Doing reviews is of little
interest to me, I've reviewed only a handfull of stuff I really
wanted/needed and that no one else was in any rush to review.

What the project really needs, is people who are primarily interested in
spending their time doing reviews, and *not* submitting and maintaining
packages. That may or may or may not make any sense, but I think its the
only way we can scale. We need free roaming gangs of QA people who are
not attached to specific packages, who do reviews and watch the CVS
changelogs like hawks.

There is only so many packages to go around. As time goes by, there's
going to be less and less "low hanging fruit" to package. I myself only
maintain a few packages, because most of the stuff I've been packaging
either got snagged by someone else first, or aren't acceptable for
Fedora. Mostly the latter. (Emulators, stuff that requires mp3, non-free
stuff, etc, bleh...)
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