On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 11:52:50AM -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote: > A longtime Debian developer Michael Stapelberg described his > frustrations with their distribution development environment > > https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ > > Many points are spookily similar to issues in Fedora, as discussed > on this list, for instance the automation of large-scale changes, > especially as it intersects with individual packagers' autonomy. I > thought it's a good read for people who care about Fedora > infrastructure.
I think Fedora has managed to avoid many of the issues Michael list: - the management of package sources is centralized and uniform. - we have a formalized process for wide-scale changes, and provenpackagers who do push such things through. In fact, if a packager wants to do some massive change, this is often used as justification for getting pp privs. - we generally don't rely solely on individual packagers to implement new paradigms. We use a combination of scripted changes, PRs in dist git, bugzillas, and nagging. If we don't do the automatically, this is most likely because we don't know how to automate it, and not because we don't have the ability to push automatic changes. - we're very slowly moving towards automatic packaging. There's still a lot of manual work, but tings are improving all the time. It depends on the language stack, but for example in the python world a lot of the packaging is now done using a standard template with a few macros, and we're slowly moving towards autogeneration based on upstream description. Rust and go and some other languages are even more automated. If one of the proposals for BuildRequires generation goes through, the packaging landscape will shift even more. And in general, Fedora *is* able to make a choice. We have one dist-git, one init system, one default compiler, one kernel, soon one python version, etc. We don't have insanities like local maintainer builds, binNMUs without changelog entries, packages without version control. And in extreme cases of non-cooperating maintainers, FPC and FESCo will put their feet down to force things to happen. We do have other problems... but I think ours are quite a bit different than Debian's. Zbyszek _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
