Re: How can we improve the Changes Process?

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 12:22:44PM -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:

[...]

> The current Changes process has been around since, IIRC, F21. I made a
> few changes to it in my time as Fedora Program Manager, but it may be
> time to consider a more substantial change. But the right approach
> there is to think about what a "modern" process looks like at a high
> level, and then think about how to implement it.

Let's imagine what the updated process could look like.  Is there more
to it than this (besides the tooling changes), at a high-level:

    From now on, please propose changes via pull request to
    'fedora-changes' Git repo.  Have the discussion on the devel list,
    Discourse, and the MR itself.  The resulting in-progress / accepted
    / completed changes will be published as HTML on docs.fp.o.

As you know, this is a bog standard way to propose changes in most
upstream projects (modulo the Discourse bit).  Yes, this assumes all
change proposers know how to use a Git-based workflow.  If you're
submitting a _technical_ change, it is entirely reasonable to expect
that you understand the basics of Git.

[...]

> > It really doesn't have to be more complicated than submitting markdown
> > docs against a repo as merge requests, and having FESCO approve/reject
> > the merge requests.
> 
> You're right, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. There
> are certain benefits to that complexity, though.

My reading of Dan's point is, we're needlessly stuck in a complicated
process that should be drastically simplified.

[...]

> > This YAML + Markdown sounds like an unncessary complication.  Can you
> > please explain why we can't keep everything in a single file?
> 
> It could. That's what we do now. But it's a pain to process because
> people get the formatting just a bit wrong. As I said in my first
> message, some fields could support validation (links, Fedora Accounts
> IDs, etc).

Again, this pain can be removed by moving away from the Wiki to a Git
repo.  The whole "Change Wrangler has to baby-sit formatting" will be a
non-issue with a Git-based workflow.   A "linter" will do that for you.

> > I don't understand -- why should the Change Wrangler spend a lot of time
> > fixing formatting issues?
> 
> Because Changes start in the wiki, go to the mailing list, FESCo's
> issue tracker, Bugzilla, the wiki again, etc etc etc.

Again, as noted in my first reply in this thread, this sounds like too
much merry-go-round.  It should be one submission to a Git repo plus
discussion on mailing list / Discourse.

> There are a lot of moving parts. Could some of them be simplified?
> Absolutely. Is it a simple change to make? Nope.

_Should_ there be so many moving parts?  What parts can be removed w/o
negative consequences?

Yes, the change takes work, but we can keep it as simple as we choose.


-- 
Kashyap Chamarthy / Red Hat / RISC-V and Fedora

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