On Fri, 10 Jul 2015 17:24:26 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > This is a vicious cycle. A lot of sponsors are burnt out on trying to > deal with new people who don't seem to have a clue.
Laziness, lack of activity, lack of interest, sloppy packaging, dumping-ground/fire'n'forget mentality, there are various factors. Sometimes it's cluelessness, yes. Paired with no interest in reading guidelines, since the self-made package builds. And lots of people think why create an RPM package, if compiling from scratch in trial-and-error fashion seems to produce something? Over the last years I've talked to quite some people. Some simply find the package review process "too embarrassing", because the tickets are world-readable. Once they learn that the package they offer is full of mistakes, they consider it "public shaming" and would like to delete the embarrassing ticket and restart from scratch. In some cases this has lead to doing early reviewing and guiding in private email, but with mixed results, such as people starting to argue about guidelines or how to do something. Sponsoring someone based on a single package only to find out the person leaves the project again before handling the first few bug reports is very disappointing for sponsors. > And a lot of > potential new people feel burnt to the crisp by reviews and > expectations of being wed to a package for life when all they wanted > to do was help someone else use some software. That's painted in too dark colours. The review process turns up too many mispackaged pieces of software, where the packages have not been tested at all. Offering such packages would be a poor choice. You can hope for random volunteers to take care of thousands of packages in a dumping ground whenever they feel like spending time on arbitrary packages, but that won't work. It is doomed to fail. Once a package is included in "the distribution", there is much more work to do compared with the review process. And "wanting to help"? Lots of packages would benefit from better bug reports (more responsive reporters) and communication between upstream and downstream. A dumping ground won't help here. All you achieve by talking about lowering the hurdles it that the current new contributors prefer waiting for the Fedora Project to announce something, such as getting rid of the review process, a dumping repo for unreviewed packages, or automatic blanket-approval of new packagers. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
