Using RCS, CVS, and tons of obscure systems; Commiter != author and other pains.
Constant hell of regenerating tons of patches by maintainers
You can say "Fedora moved to git / dist-git already"
Theoreticaly yes, in reality people are still using it like dist-CVS.
And in the first place CVS was warped to Dist-CVS which it was never designed for (lookaside cache arch, etc.)
The most difficult isn't to learn a new syntax / command but to adapt one's thought process.
You could ask what's wrong about that?
TLDR - nearly everything.
Biggest pain - manual archival of upstream (git) repo in a tar.gz as without .git metadata! Why?
Archiving patches in git! Again..
When rebase is done, half of the patches might not apply - maintaining granularity and manually! regenerating invidivual patches on top!
Developer time is precious and we waste it on unfriendly, unproductive workflow (IMHO).
Method for 21st century
Use dist-git only for META data:
"sources" flat file,
other configuration things,
etc.
Use common set of scripts for various project versions.
Maintain the component source code in a normal (non dist-* VCS system)
Workflow on next page.
Maintenance git workflow
Method for 21st century
Already used in most JBoss Community upstreams for years, in tons of other upstreams too.
Using Pull/Merge Request workflow on top of git (or other distributed VCS).
Upstream has liuetenants who have push access, everyone else submits pull requests - even if you had commit (push) rights 10 years ago, it does not matter, you need to sumbit PR - for a good reason, it's proper code review.
Every pull request is safeguarded by CI (Travis, Jenkins, Teamcity, you name it).
What about RPMs
Now everything is docker, docker, docker, but you might need to maintain good ol' RPMs.
Why not place a full git repository into the SRPM - automated tool can always generate .patch files from individual commits including proper naming & metadata?
A policy question - set up proper git hooks to safeguard developers obey these rules.
So, when will we have this in Fedora?
Questions / Discussion time
Thanks for your attention, let's bring Fedora to 21st century.