planet issues

I’ve been reading a couple of people complaining that the planet changed how it gathered its feeds and they have had problems with the new mechanism. I’d like to answer a few of their questions/points:

1. I posted about it here twice and to fedora-devel-list. I waited a full week between the posts before I made any changes at all: I think it’s reasonable to expect people who are on the planet  to READ the planet.

2. The technical critieria we use to call someone a fedora contributor is ‘user has signed the cla’ and ‘user is a member of one group in FAS other than cla_done’. That’s it. Once you have those things you’re done. You have an account on fedorapeople.org.

3. This may sound elitist and terrible but if you’re unable to edit a single file. Save it named as ‘.planet’ and then scp it to fedorapeople.org then are you even USING fedora? Or any linux distribution for that matter? Hell, If you’re using kde or gnome you can do the copying of the file to fedorapeople.org using just the gui.

4. I think making it be just a field someone adds in fas is fine(ish). Here are my problems with it:

a. it means the criteria for being a fedora contributor is having any sort of FAS account. Nothing more. Gee, I’m sure that won’t make the drive-by additions to our planet go way up and be filled with necrophilliac pr0n or anything

b. It does complicate matters for making arbitrary subgroups of planets. It doesn’t make it impossible, just a bit more complicated.

5. I made these changes to encourage people to add their planet w/o having to go through any intermediary person. The goal of the changes were self-service but protecting us from crack-filled craziness in the form of random spamming drive-bys.