TL;DR this is early heads-up that I'm considering to eventually orphan
all my Java packages, which could lead to release engineering retiring
them and affecting your packages.
Hello Java SIG members,
Currently I'm listed as maintainer of more than 450 packages in
Fedora, great majority of which are Java packages. For almost 300 of
them I am set as primary maintainer (point of contact). This is too
many for me to keep at high level of quality.
One way to ease package maintenance is taking advantage of modularity.
It improves maintainer efficiency in several ways (which I'm not going
to describe now as it's not the point of this message). Java software
I care about most is already packaged and available in Fedora 28 as
modules, but I am still maintaining non-modular ("ursine") packages to
keep them available to users who are not aware of modularity or not
ready to start using it.
Good news is that modules are planned to be available by default in
all release variants starting from Fedora 29 [1], allowing users to
transparently install modular packages without even being aware of
modularity. Provided that this change is implemented and proves to be
working as expected, I will be able to focus on modularity as the only
way of packaging in which I will be maintaining software in Fedora.
This means orphaning master branches and maintaining packages only in
arbitrary branches [2].
The biggest problem I can see with this move is that currently modules
can't be used as build dependencies of ursine packages, so ursine
branches of packages like Maven can't be simply retired without
breaking other packages. I will possibly wait until solution like
ursa-major [3] is available before orphaning most important packages,
but others (esp. those most time-consuming) I may orphan anyway.
Anyway, I haven't made any final decision to orphan any packages yet.
This is simply something I've been thinking about for past few months
and I am open for feedback. Once I make my decision I will send
another message to devel list with full list of orphaned packages.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ModulesForEveryone
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ArbitraryBranching
[3]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedorapr…
--
Mikolaj Izdebski
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat
IRC: mizdebsk
