On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 04:20:32PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: > On Tue, August 16, 2005 15:46, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > >> We should strive to increase what I normally call the bus-factor; how > >> many people need to be run over by a bus before the project stops. > >> And for several of the packages in debian, the count is 1 or less. > > > > That's not true. For several of the packages in Debian, it is true that > > there will be a problem if their maintainer will be run over by a bus. > > However, that in no way means the project "stops". As the past has > > taught us, should something like that happen, there will be people > > willing to take over. > > You're missing an important case here: the one where the maintainer isn't > completely absent, but lacks the time to maintain the package in an > optimal manner.
Those are excellent reasons to give the package away and/or to start looking for comaintainers. [...] > The argument that a maintainer is currently doing just fine doesn't hold > in my opinion, since being swamped in other areas can happen to anyone, > and can happen unexpectedly when it's too late to get a comaintainer. Uh. I meant to say that there are some packages for which maintenance is so low-volume and so easy that the overhead imposed by team-maintenance is just not worth it. For low-volume, easy-to-maintain packages, it's never too late to go get a comaintainer. Or to give the package away. And I simply don't believe that 'important package' implies 'lots of work to maintain it'. -- The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the pavement is precisely one bananosecond
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