GNOME/Community Inclusion Policy

From openSUSE

This is a draft to be discussed at the the GNOME Team Meeting on September 27 2007

As part of the GNOME repositories on the openSUSE Build Service, the easiest way for new contributors in the community to be involved is GNOME:Community. There has been a lot of discussion about how best to manage this repository in a way that balances the desire to involve the community as widely as possible and the need to provide usable packages for end users. This page represents the GNOME Team's policy on the inclusion of packages in GNOME:Community.

There are three main reasons why a package may appear in GNOME:Community. Individual packages may of course meet more than one of the criteria:

• A package that is not included in the official openSUSE distribution.
• A package that is no longer included in the official openSUSE distribution.
• An updated version of a package from the distribution.

In addition, packages included in GNOME:Community should use the GNOME Packaging Policy to ensure a consistent style and greater maintainability.

Packages not included in openSUSE

A package may be included in GNOME:Community that is not included in the mainline official openSUSE distribution. That package must fulfill the following criteria:

• It has been tested before being imported into GNOME:Community

Normally this will be in the form of the package originally being created in a user's home project, built, downloaded, installed and verified as working. A new contributor ought also to ask the team to test it before it is imported.

• It is going to be maintained

Packages that are imported to GNOME:Community and then never updated make the repository as a whole appear unprofessional and more risky to use than needs be. People adding packages to the repository must be committed to the maintenance of that package. In the event that they are subsequently unable to do so, they should either enlist someone to look after their packages or remove them.

• It is a GNOME related package

On the face of it, this seems obvious but this point is included to be sure it is clear.

• It has the potential to be included in openSUSE

This criterion is optional but GNOME:Community can serve as a 'staging area' for packages that may be proposed for inclusion in future versions of openSUSE.

Packages no longer included in openSUSE

A package may be transferred to GNOME:Community from the official openSUSE distribution if the package is no longer maintained upstream and no-one from the GNOME Team is going to take responsibility for its upstream maintenance or appears to no longer be maintained. In this case, it ought to be verified that the package is used. Also, in the event that upstream maintenance is restored, GNOME:Community can act as a staging area for re-inclusion in openSUSE as in the case of packages not previously included.

Updated Packages

Because of the openSUSE update policy -- that within a product's lifecycle packages are not updated but significant bugs are patched -- new features in specific packages are not easily made available to end users through the official updates channel. Packages can be updated within GNOME:Community in order to provide new features without the need to upgrade the entire GNOME stack through the other GNOME repositories.

Updated packages that in turn require other packages to be updated should be tested outside of GNOME:Community prior to inclusion in the same way as new packages.