Mass package changes

First you should post to the Fedora devel list and gain consensus for the changes you want to make. No matter how simple or needed you might think they are, there may be better ways to do things or the change may not be needed for other reasons. Part of this discussion should be the development of a concise set of instructions which packagers will need to follow in order to fix the affected packages. This can of course refer to external documents but packagers should be able to get the basic idea of what changes are needed without having to chase down links.

The set of packages which will need changes should be posted to the devel-announce list as soon as that set has been determined. To make things as easy as possible on the maintainers involved, this should take the form of two lists, one listing packages and their owners, and the other listing maintainers and their packages. This makes it trivial for a single maintainer to see how much work there is to do, and also for others to have an idea of who might need help. For convenience, a utility which will generate these lists given a file of package names is available from as "find-package-maintainers".

These lists should be updated throughout the discussion as packages are fixed, and should also include the instructions for fixing the packages mentioned above.

Automated package cleanup is encouraged. If it is possible to make the relevant change in an automated fashion with a low chance of unwanted side effects then this should at least be considered, even if that can only be done for a subset of the affected packages. The actual details of this process (such as whether builds are required or if the changes should simply be committed) are almost certainly dependent on the changes involved and should be worked out during the discussion. Proven packagers may perform automated cleanup without using pull requests by pushing directly to source control.

Either ask the list or several interested maintainers to look over the text you intend to send to the devel-announce list (next step) and intend to use in your bug text. This will help make your text clear and understandable and free from typos or other simple errors. Make sure several people see your text and agree it describes the problem clearly along with solutions. This text should include the instructions developed above.

Once you have a clear idea of the changes needed, post a clear email on changes needed to the devel-announce list. Wait at least a week to allow maintainers to make changes or ask you further questions about the change on the devel list. If the change must be done due to some deadline, please note it in the email. If you intend to have provenpackager(s) or an automated process simply make the changes to all unchanged packages, please note that as well in the email.

Now you can file a tracker bug in bugzilla and bugs against all the packages that still need changes. Note that you should check to make sure maintainers didn’t already make the changes and only file bugs against those packages that didn’t.