An alternate proposal to answer the guidelines question.

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Thu May 17 18:18:57 UTC 2007


Peter Jones wrote:
> We were talking about this on #fedora-meeting, and I was asked to write 
> up my answer to the question of how to handle violations of the 
> packaging guidelines.
> 
> It seems to me that the fundamental question is: what do I do when I 
> find a packaging problem?
> 
> The answer should be:
> 
> 1) Contact the maintainer about it.  Start by filing a bug, work from 
> there.  Be reasonable.
> 2) if the maintainer doesn't respond, or won't fix it and can't satisfy 
> you with any good reasons why not, then send a note to FESCO. 
> Conversely, if you're a maintainer and somebody won't listen to reason 
> about when there is a good reason not to change something, contact FESCO.
> 3) when FESCO is notified of a problem, they appoint somebody who they 
> trust to do the right thing to arbitrate the dispute.  The arbitrator 
> has the right to decide right and wrong here.
> 4) do what the arbitrator says.
> 5) if a maintainer still doesn't fix a package, the arbitrator lets 
> FESCO know that we need to start the orphan package process.
> 

In general this sounds reasonable, I especially like how this procedure 
normally shouldn't come into play, but only becomes active under exceptional 
circumstances.

However the FESco apoints an arbitrator part wories me, the maintainer should 
have a say in this too. There are some people in this community who 
(unfortunately) mix about as well as fire and water.

Regards,

Hans




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