I think that there are a few more things not working right at the moment,
they are also related to communication.
Splitting the development process into subprojects (repos) where some
of them have their own more or less active mailing lists was partially
counterproductive:
While using the kernel repo *might* justify the requirement to follow
the corresponding mailinglist, once the changes/results become part
of factory, this is no longer valid. The same goes for other repos as
well.
Another thing with the project specific repos are bugreporting/contact
information: At least some repos (kernel, xorg are the only ones I
checked) don't provide that kind of information in their packages:
The only info is something like obs://build.opensuse.org/<project> and
<upstream-url>. It would be helpful if the packages would contain the
information on how to contact the maintainers of the repo/package in
addition to the upstream project.
Last point in this list is removing packages from the project (moving
them to the attic) because they are either obsolete or unmaintained.
Deciding this stuff is causing grief time and again because these
discussions are on a packaging specific mailinglist. This is not where
the *users* are. If it has been determined that a package should be
removed, then this decision needs to be announced somewhere where the
users of the affected package are - in some cases volunteers have been
known to step forward and take over maintainance of the package - why
cause grief beforehand?
I have two major requests:
1) Make it possible to follow just ONE mailinglist and get informed
about all changes that are likely to affect the project or severly
affect the users of a specific package.
2) Provide contact information in the opensuse repos (maybe there
is one and I'm just being blind, but neither rpm nor zypper seem
to have it).
Thanks
Joerg
--
Joerg Mayer