Fedora's Packager Sponsors Responsibility Policy [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
May 28, 2008

A Linux distribution is really the sum of its packages. The more packages that are available, the more useful it becomes for a wide range of needs. Case in point, Debian has some 20,000 plus packages available to it's users, and to the wide variety of Debian-based distributions.

Fedora doesn't have quite as many packages available (yet), but the project hasn't been working at it for nearly as long either. Of course having thousands of packages available is no good if they won't interact well with each other. A distribution isn't just a collection of random binary packages. Packaging guidelines are critical for ensuring that any package you (the user) installs, works well with the rest of your system.

Fedora is working toward having an ever growing number of volunteers maintaining an ever growing number of packages, and still having an integrated distribution that works whether you want the "Everything Spin" or one of the highly specialized Spins, or something in between.

One part of making that happen is having sponsors for new volunteers, and coming up with a policy to guide these sponsors. A draft version of the Packager Sponsors Responsibility Policy was posted to Fedora-devel late last week. The wiki version contains some additions and clarifications.

With the new policy, sponsors are maintainers with a good record of package maintenance and have shown a willingness to review packages and assist others. Sponsors act as mentors for new contributors, as package reviewers and ultimately they are responsible for making sure that bugs are fixed in their sponsored packages.

The policy also indicates some conditions where a sponsorship might be revoked:

A maintainer that no longer wishes to contribute to Fedora, a maintainer that refuses to follow guidelines, or irreconcilable differences between the maintainer and the Sponsor. In this event it is the responsibility of the Sponsor to orphan the maintainers packages, and do any other needed cleanups.

Like all such policies, it will evolve over time, but all in all it is a good start to a policy that should help new maintainers get involved with the Fedora project.