On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 11:24:53AM +0100, Richard Brown wrote:
On 14 February 2018 at 21:48, Michal Kubecek <mkubecek@suse.cz> wrote:
...and this is another problem. Unnecessarily strict checks in Factory enforce new constructions which do not work in older (still supported) distributions. Results either in unreadable specfiles full of %if's or in maintainers resigning on building on anything but Factory. Neither should be considered desirable, AFAICS.
And yet, my recent foray into implementing such checks into Factory has given me a very different perspective.
Of the 207+ changes needed to get rid of /var/adm/fillup-templates, the _vast_ majority of the changes were accepted without issue, long before any such checks were live in Factory. The rate of acceptance of such changes was much faster than I or anyone I spoke to beforehand had expected. There was some modification of my changes to better suit the personal tastes of how some maintainers wanted their specfiles to look, and that was absolutely fine - the end result was aligned to what we collectively needed in Factory.
Alternative explanation: survivorship bias. You chose to only count people who learned to live with previous annoying checks and for whom this is only one nuisance in a long row. You ignore those who already left, you ignore those who might join but won't because of the problem. It's not meant to provoke. I know real flesh-and-bone people who do not want to have anything to do with openSUSE package maintenance because of the problem. I know real people who are happy to polish some package in their home project but have absolutely no intention to suffer the pain of getting it into Factory (some even prefer the pain of getting them into SLE without them being in Factory). And I can't blame them at all. Quite the opposite, my decision to do otherwise with those few packages I care for for various reasons is being challenged way too often.
The _only_ packages which were not modified before the strict checks went live all are firmly maintained by people using @suse.* addresses, who are meant to be doing package maintainer as their everyday job.
The _only_ negative feedback I got complaining about the changes or checks at all, were from people with @suse.* addresses, who are meant to be doing package maintainer as their everyday job.
It's hard to believe, given how few SUSE R&D employees have packaging as their everyday job. (20? Probably not even that.) It seems more likely that you don't realize what people in R&D are actually doing for their job. I, for one, spend perhaps 2-3 per cent of my work time by packaging. (Funny enough, it could be even less if it wasn't for the continuous tightening of the screws and new annoying checks.) Across the kernel teams, I'm pretty sure I'm still safely above average with that. Yes, even most SUSE employees have to do actual packaging only now and then (if at all) and even then, it mostly consists of adding a bug fix or rebasing to a new upstream version which are rather routing tasks. Or rather this is what it would look like if it wasn't for the problem we are discussing.
My impression is that if there is a problem anywhere, it is a small subset of professionals doing package maintainer as their everyday job who might need to consider how they could do a better job of keeping up with their peers, including those volunteers doing this in their spare time.
Alternative explanation: SUSE R&D employees are just more likely to be vocal about the problem. Partly thanks to the fact that for them, you and the distribution maintainers are "just people", partly because some of them also maintain those packages in SLE and it's much harder to get rid of a package there. (Again, I'm assuming, you in fact meant SUSE R&D employees in general, not only those few who actual have packaging as their everyday job.) Please, leave your ivory tower for a moment. Please, stop patting each other's backs and telling each other how great job you are doing in improving the distribution. Please, stop for a moment and try to imagine what it looks like from the point of view of an occasional package maintainer who cannot and/or does not want to spend half of their packaging time by making it compliant to your latest whims. Michal Kubeček -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org