Hello,
TL;DR What about a place where people could ask for something to be
packaged in Fedora?
I haven't seen almost any distribution having a package wishlist so it
is either a bad idea (and doesn't have any real value) or everybody
else missed a good opportunity. Or possibly they (maybe even Fedora)
have it, but it is not advertised well.
The use-cases, I imagine:
1. I am a non-technical Fedora user without the ability to learn RPM
packaging, and I would like to have some software in the Fedora
repositories.
2. I want to learn RPM packaging and I don't want to package
hello.spec for the hundredth time
3. I want to become a Fedora packager but I don't work on an upstream
project that is not already in the Fedora repositories.
4. I am bored and feeling altruistic
Implementation options:
1. A standalone website - Sounds like a **lot** of work. We would need
to submit and list the requests, subscribe with email, allow marking
something as blocked by something else, etc.
2. Since the thing, I am describing is basically an issue tracker, we
could create a project on Pagure and have just issues in it
(similar to what
https://pagure.io/fedora-magazine-newsroom has)
or on GitHub (similar to what rpmfusion has
https://github.com/rpmfusion-infra/fedy/issues/new/choose). I
personally prefer this option because we could have this
up-and-running in minutes, see if people find it useful and
scratch it otherwise.
3. Bugzilla - More complicated setup than a project on
Pagure/GitHub, more complex UI discouraging newbies and
non-technical people to use it (which is a problem, since they are
the target audience). On the other hand, we could easily link
wished packages from package review tickets.
4. Wiki - I don't have many experiences with wikis but I never
enjoyed working with them. IMHO they are a boring middle ground
between static page generators and websites with a database, always
being worse than those two. But if you think a wiki would be a
good fit, I am fine with that.
5. Basically 2. or 3. but with a website, that presents the issues
from Pagure or Bugzilla in a more friendly format. I can see some
benefits to this, and I would certainly enjoy implementing it,
but I see this as a long-term thing, only if the whole package
wishlist idea works.
Other distributions:
- GNU/Guix -
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/Wishlist - That
wiki actually looks good
- OpenSuse -
https://tr.opensuse.org/Paket_%C4%B0stek_Listesi_(Wishlist)
- RPM Fusion -
https://rpmfusion.org/Wishlist
What do you think? Do we have anything like this? Should we try it?
What option should we go with?
Jakub