Who maintains RPM?

Who maintains RPM?

A little light to add to things:

The thread about Jeff on the Fab list is partly about behavior on bugzilla and partly about issues interacting with him from various rpm maintainers in various distros.

Cruise through bug reports and the rpm-devel mailing list archives. There are a number of not-so-fun interactions about different patches.

This last week Jeff announced that he would be changing the license of rpm from gpl to lgpl:
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-devel/2006-Aug...

That seemed a bit odd to some of us.

The fedora project board has been discussing what to do about rpm in general over the last month. At the last meeting I was tasked to talk to the other stakeholders in rpm (the distros using it, other interested parties) and find out what other people thought. The goal was to form a consortium of people who want to help maintain and further development of rpm.

I talked to people at novell/suse, mandriva, openpkg and some other not-quite-distro but not-quite-unrelated parties.

The sentiments were similar:
we're not sure what's going on. we're watching everyone else to see what they do.

What I don't want to see happen with rpm is that it breaks down and fragments. I'd like to see everyone using roughly the same tree with a stable release cycle and development roadmap. This means getting all the people involved in a place where they're willing to talk and figure out what we ALL want to achieve.

We cannot do that with the current development "process" in place.

So that's what I know and what I've been doing to try and make this a bit more reasonable for everyone.

rpm is a crucial piece of infrastructure and I think it deserves a development process at least as robust and rigorous as gnome's.

thanks,
-sv