Re: the latter half of october, the maintainer goes offline

[Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2024 at 05:22:27PM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> There are two maintainership models I can think of: either a single
> individual or a group of people would take over.
>
>   - A single individual needs funding. The ideal situation would be if
>     that funding came independent of any of the large forges. Or
>     alternatively, the big players in this context come together to all
>     pay into the same pot to fund that person. In theory, the role could
>     be elected and serve for a limited amount of time so that overall,
>     the community is in control.
>
>   - A group of individuals could take over, sharing the responsibility.
>     There would be a ton of different questions in this context: how to
>     form the group, how to balance its interests, how to distribute the
>     work across its members, how to resolve disputes, etc.

I do think there is a need to have a single individual who is ultimately
responsible for ensuring that the patches are reviewed and merged in a
timely fashion, that releases are cut on time and are high-quality, etc.

But I also think that the project benefits from having trusted
individuals who are knowledgeable about specific areas of the codebase.
The maintainer can lean and rely on those individuals to get a sanity
check of whether or not some patches are good or not. For instance, I
would imagine that Junio relies on you to help review patches in the
reftable implementation.

I think that's more or less the status-quo, and IMHO it works well from
a contributor's perspective. I would be curious if the maintainer feels
the same or not ;-).

I know that we have discussed in the past a more formalized version of
the above where individual sub-systems maintainers are listed in a
MAINTAINERS file with specific roles and responsibilities. I don't think
the project is large enough or has enough active participants to warrant
that formal of a process, but perhaps I am in the minority here.

Thanks,
Taylor