Probational Packaging Contributors
Why?
We don't have a clear path by which people interested in taken on some maintainership duties for existing packages can earn sponsorship and thus gain full access to the Fedora code repository and build infrastructure. Our sponsorship policy up till now has relied strongly on new contributors submitting a new package for inclusion in Fedora and then using the submission review process as a way to gauge a person's understanding of the Fedora packaging process and willingness to work within the process.
The purpose of this proposal is to provide an alternative way to gauge a new contributor's readiness for sponsorship in situations where they are primarily interested in helping with existing packages and do not have a new package to submit. This can be a common situation when attempting to include upstream developers into co-maintainer roles for existing Fedora packages, or in situations where a current Fedora packager is looking to transition some of their workload to another contributor.
What?
The proposal is to build a process mechanism that encourages existing contributors to perform "on the job training" of new contributors, without diminishing the role of sponsorship to ensure the health of the packaging community.
This proposal involves a restructuring of Fedora Account System group definitions in such a way that individual fully sponsored Fedora contributors can request limited access be granted to the Fedora code repository system to yet-to-be sponsored contributors on a probational basis. These FAS changes would allow the probational contributor to perform a set of packaging tasks while still holding the contributor mentor accountable for all binary builds sent through the Fedora buildsystem.
How?
- FAS group definitions needed and what actions they can take:
1. newpackager -- explicit cvs acls in pkgdb. cannot build 2. cvsextras(packager) -- cvs acls that are open to cvsextras + explicit cvs acl in pkgdb. can build anything 3. cleaners -- cvs access to all packages open or not. can build anything.
- Koji changes needed:
1. koji set to no longer auto-create an account. 2. Old accounts that are not also cvsextras members are removed. 3. cron job for FAS2 that creates koji accounts if you're approved in cvsextras.
Commnets
Apr 29 11:40:41 <abadger1999> Not sure if we need to mess with creating a disabled account for everyone else or if merely disabling auto-create account in koji will be sufficient.
- JonStanley - you lack a process for someone to progress from newpackager to fully sponsored outside of the current process. Simply implementing a "second-class packager" will do nothing to ensure co-maintainership where it makes sense, when there is no progression to gaining full access.