On Wednesday 29 September 2010 21:17:45 Dave Plater wrote:
Hi, I've been trying to submit an svn derived version of KTrafficAnalyzer to KDE:Extra, the package used to be in the old kde3 community repo and has been around in openSUSE for quite a while. It's been ported to kde4. I've been using the package from the authors home project and it occasionally crashed and lost the usage stats but after my recent update from KDE:Distro:Factory it consistently segfaulted on start up. This is a good thing that enabled me to track down the problem and patch it. It's now stable on a patched svn revision 44 so I decided to submit this very usefull package to KDE:Extra and am quite happy to maintain it as I use it all the time and it's a simple package only to have it rejected on the grounds that it's svn derived. This seems a bit stupid because the released package is unstable and even has a source forge bug against it from an openSUSE 11.3 user. I've had problems submitting a package fix to KDE:Extra before but in that case the maintainers reply was rather rude that issue was simply bad communication and was resolved and that particular maintainer accepted my second submit attempt of KTrafficAnalyzer pointing out that there wasn't a Url: in the spec file and asking me to fix it. I decided to patch the released tarball to svn 44 and submit that along with the fixed spec file but alas the first anti subversion maintainer caught the request and declined it. I was under the assumption that I'm helping to make openSUSE a better distribution but my encounters with KDE:Extra have made me think that that particular repository is an ego circus, it's easier to get a new package into Factory than into KDE:Extra, I've two new packages in 11.3 one of them totally new to openSUSE and one that the previous maintainer didn't have time for so it was dropped so I speak from experience. The point of this email are the questions :- am I flogging a dead horse trying to be a useful member of the community? Why do I get the impression that KDE:Extra is maintained a an exclusive club? Thanks for taking the time to read my rant. Dave P Hi,
First, I was the one who sent a rejection about the missing URL.. It is more important than a simple single line. As a reviewer, I feel _strongly_ I have an obligation to ensure I and others can verify independently the all source code going into the distro, Factory, Contrib or in popular community repos like KDE:Extras. In fact today I filed an enhancement to automatically check for this in rpmlint used by OBS: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=642588 What I remind people when they are packaging stuff for the distro, especially when a novice is: "You are taking root, even oh so breifly, on a _lot_ of people's systems... proceed accordingly." Poor packaging is a very quick way to destroy the reputation of the openSUSE community and the distro. Now, OBS is brilliant in that it has automated a good deal of grunt work in the QA department, but still it takes a certain level of skill and applied policy to QA the end esults. Remeber the rule: Garbage In > Garbage Out... One has to note Debian has a very solid reputation in this regard, even if one can debate some of their policies/techniques... They are _really_ strict about packaging and because of that they have a pretty high level of trust in the open source world. Now, the second part has nothing to do with ego, but more a commonly agreed policy by the KDE:Extras maintainers, of which I am one, to not put any svn snapshots into Extras, but the place for those is KDE:Playground. Seems to me a sensible rule in general. As there is always room for well justified exceptions to rules, in this case, the best way to proceed would have been to mail the kde list or visit #opensuse-kde on IRC, before submitting and ask for an exception and explain the facts as above, as both Raymond, I or others would have most certainly followed up with questions or comments. The way it was presented to us via OBS, was missing this important info, naturally we would reject an SR like that. I've learned that Raymond is also a pretty skilled packager and he has done a ton of work to make the KDE repos really solid and offers end users a wide range of options to run the latest bleeding edge stuff or polished stable stuff. I for one would never dismiss your efforts to contribute to the distro. I know you have done a lot of bug fixes all over the place, so no issue there. What we have here is a simple issue of mis-communication or clash of communication styles. nothing more. I suspect you do not visit IRC often as it is another important channel of communication for members to hash out these kinds of things... I hope you can join us there when time allows as well.... We're all a pretty friendly bunch. :) I hope that puts some clarity on why things were done the way they were... Nothing evil... just good folks misunderstanding things... Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org