Re: Package Maintenance

[Koen Kooi <k.kooi@student.utwente.nl>]

On 17-03-09 20:18, Chris Larson wrote:
> I'd like to propose re-establishing MAINTAINER, set per package, to
> individuals, or left as default for packages which aren't directly
> maintained.
>
> Doing this would:
> - Facilitate dumping a list of unmaintained packages to give to new
> users wanting to volunteer to help us, but not knowing how to
> contribute.
> - Return some individual responsibility to the project, giving one
> person the blame for brokenness for that package, as well as giving
> responsibility for pushing patches upstream to that person.  In my
> opinion, a number of the recent issues in the project are due, in
> part, to a lack of that individual responsibility.  Everything is
> fuzzy, determined by a group, instead.
> - Allow us to physically separate, in the repository, those packages
> which get the most attention (are maintained) from those which get the
> least (maintained by the entire team).  We could finally be *honest*
> with our users about what we work on, telling them that the packages
> which are maintained by the team are in need of an individual
> maintainer, and get less attention, so bugs there will be fixed more
> slowly, and there are no guarantees on functionality there.  I think
> it'd be better to have a core set of *functional* recipes than have a
> huge set of "might work, might not" recipes as things stand today.  In
> my opinion, this would be more likely to give new users stability than
> creating a stable branch, while making better use of our limited
> manpower, rather than increasing the load drastically.
>
> Opinions?

As long as it doesn't get put in resulting packages in any way, it's 
fine by me.

regards,

Koen