>Russ Allbery wrote: >So, here's a possibly weird proposal. > >What if we had some mechanism whereby people could indicate interest in >maintaining a package should anything happen to the current maintainer? >Have it be as non-confrontational as possible by having it not indicate >any feeling about whether the package is currently maintained well, >just a willingness to help should the current maintainer be unable to >continue for some reason.
I like it. I doubt it will work for one of the reasons below, but I like it. >Then, should the package run into any trouble, we'd know whether anyone >else is actually already in a position to potentially take it over, or >whether there really isn't anyone who feels like they could do so. > >Problems that I see with this right away are: > > * The data could easily get stale. I may be willing to help with a > package right now, but a year from now when it has problems, I may no > longer be in that position. I'm not sure if some sort of periodic ping > of "you said you'd be willing to take on all of these; reply if that's > not still true" would cut it. Yep, this is the problem I anticipated too. > * My guess is that if we put this system in place, we'll immediately > discover that most of our core packages have no backup ready and > available. But that may be useful information anyway. I'd be willing to take over ifupdown (though I'd hope for comaintainers), or doc-debian or lilo (which I could handle by myself). But not all at the same time. :-) I'd also maintain lynx or gcc in a pinch though I'd want comaintainers and might not be able to keep it up for very long solo. >For example, I (and probably various other people) would register my >willingness to take over autoconf should Ben ever no longer be in a >position to maintain it. That doesn't mean that he's doing a bad job >(he's doing a *great* job so far as I can tell); it's just a note that >should anything catastrophic happen to him, people don't have to >scramble to look for a replacement maintainer for that package. You know, this is a really clever proposal, even if you think it's "weird". :-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
