Co-maintainers to assist upstreams with their packages in Extras

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 11:56:02PM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> It's an unfortunate fact that our sponsorship process makes things
> rather difficult for an upstream who would simply like to make their
> software available in Extras.  They don't want to submit multiple
> packages and they aren't generally interested in doing a lot of extra
> community work.  Some might say that if they're not interested in the
> community then they shouldn't be a maintainer (with all of the
> attendant access this brings), but I think that the gift of their
> software should count for something.  Frankly I think that we should
> encourage upstream software authors to become involved with Extras
> instead of letting the packages sit endlessly in the purgatory of the
> FE-NEW queue.

After some thinking and looking at some packages, I came to the conclusion
that having upstream as primary maintainer in fedora should be avoided if 
possible. Indeed, there may be conflicts of interest between some upstream 
goals and best packaging in fedora practices. Having upstream as a 
co-maintainer should be, however, encouraged, if the upstream author is 
allready a fedora community member. 

> One proposed solution to this involves finding an existing Fedora
> package maintainer to co-maintain the package.  This gives the
> benefits of bringing together someone intimately familiar with the
> software and someone already familiar with Fedora policies and
> procedures.  I think it's a pretty good idea, but it does require that
> someone step up to co-maintain.

To me it would be better if the fedora community member was the primary
maintainer, working in cooperation with upstream. I don't think it should be
easier for upstream maintainers to be sponsored than for other maintainers.

In my opinion we are not that much interested in upstream working on 
packaging issues, but on bugs and distribution issues. So in my opinion
what is really usefull is that upstream is CC'ed to initial reviews and 
bugs against that package, he doesn't needs to be in the fedora community.
He can subscribe to mailing lists if he wants but I can't see what we would
gain in having upstream be able to change things in CVS.

To put it differently I think it would be better if upstream helped fedora
packagers, but not necessarily by being in the community.

--
Pat