[Rpm-maint] Interested in helping...

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 16:20 -0500, James Olin Oden wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I just recently got the news about this new fork() of rpm meant to be
> "the" upstream source of rpm for vendors.  Frankly, I think this has
> been waiting far too long and am happy to see it.  That being said I
> would definately like to be a part of this and help in anyway I can,
> as a representitive for my company which operates in the telophony
> space.
> 
> To wit I figured I should list the sort of things that I/we are interested in:
> 
> - continue to enhance and harden the rollback mechanism.
> - add tools to help manage rollbacks.
> - complete perl bindings, capable of:
>    - driving builds.
>    - installation/upgrade.
>    - reporting.
>    - distribution analysis.
> - better build API (haven't thought too deeply about this, but I know
> I would like to
>   from an API perspective drive rpm builds).
> - continue to harden pre-transactional checks.
> - better automatic dependency detection.
> - help rpm become a more intuitive tool to use (vague, I know)
> - drill in some sane way to allow for alternate policies within rpm.
> - continue to harden rpm in general.
> 
> Anyway, I can't say that any decision has been made to go with this
> version of rpm versus any other version yet, but I do very much like
> the idea of there being a reasonably supported upstream version that
> is backed by major vendors, and I would like to help with that in any
> way possible.
> 
> I think the first thing I could probably start helping with is picking
> up where Chip Turner left off with the perl bindings.  Rollbacks is
> another discussion that we could deal with later.  I haven't read all
> the information on your source control but I'll look at that and
> probably have questions.
> 
> Is the help welcome?
> 

I can't imagine why not.

One thing we had talked about when we were figuring out how to set this
up was the need for vendors to have their own branch. The reality of rpm
for years has been that everyone has their own fork. Suse/Novell, Red
Hat, Mandriva, etc. Everyone ha been maintaining their own thing. And we
wanted to make sure that the scm we were using would allow that to
continue happening. I think we want folks to contribute back things that
are commonly useful but we're not delusional about people suddenly using
a common rpm w/o any patches to it in their own installs/releases.

It would make sense to me for you to have a
branch/tree/whatever-the-hg-terminology-is for the rollback-focused
work.

However, it's not up to me, I'm just a hanger-on who is helping set
things up. The people with commit access right now are: Jeremy Katz,
Paul Nasrat and Michael Schroeder.

Jeremy, Paul, Michael, what do y'all think?

-sv