Dear Factory contributors and packagers, As openSUSE 12.2 is frozen and Factory is 'open to go wild' again, I would like to announce that the packaging guidelines have some extensions (not really new) that will be stricter enforced than they used to be. Currently a common rule to be 'ignored' or packagers are not aware is around the topics of: - .Changes entries - Patches First, the .changes entry (rpm changelog) surves two purposes: - News for the user - History tracking of packaging changes (often referenced in bugs to verify if a user has the latest packaging bugfixeS). A simple "Update to version x.y.z" is, as before, not accepted. There should be some buzz around the update for the user; some major reasons to the upgrade should be listed Changes on the package itself should be mentioned in a way that any other contributor to the same package can follow traces of why something is the way it is. Commonly, Added (build)dependencies are interesting to be seen, special hacks to make something work in a particular way [..]: Always consider that package maintenance is a distributed task and various contributors need to be able to step up at will. Patches: The rules about patches are listed at http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Patches_guidelines . Most prominent is likely the mentioning of the patches life cycle, which forces you to mention additions and removals of patches in the changelog. As history shows, this can be helpful if a patch got removed, and later a regression is reported; finding out when a patch was removed can be crucial in reconstructing feature sets (including contacting the contributor that dropped it.. which is easily extracted from the .changes if listed) The main appeal is to the devel project maintainers / reviewers, to keep out for those rules, to live according to them, as it is frustrating for everybody if a package needs to be declined by the Factory Review team: - The dev prj maintainer is the one getting the 'decline' (as it was usually a forwarded request), which often leaves the 'fixing' to the devel project maintainers, where the 'originator' of the fix would have been willing to actually do that... And the Factory Review team also prefers to see complying submissions to having to reject SRs... reject is not fun for anybody! Looking forward to many more SRs to accept! Dominique / DimStar -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org