On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 05:41:00PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> writes:
>
> > Regressing on being able to orphan all packages of a known-MIA/retired
> > maintainer would be very bad.
>
> I agree, but that's not directly relevant here, since we're talking about
> team-maintained packages. The whole *point* of team maintenance is that
> there's no reason to orphan a package just because one team member went
> away. If that weren't the case, the package is, *by definition*, not
> team-maintained (or the team itself is MIA, which is a different issue as
> discussed below).
Your definition is completely detached from the reality in Debian.
Many (likely the majority) of teams in Debian have not more
than 1 active member.
> >> Currently, when the MIA team finds someone who is no longer active,
> >> teams have to go do a bunch of work to strip their name out of uploader
> >> fields. That work doesn't really make Debian any better; it's just
> >> bookkeeping. When the team has other ways of knowing the health of
> >> their packages, I'd like to let them not do this bookkeeping.
>
> > You are assuming that the team notices without the current notifications
> > from the MIA team that a team member is no longer active in Debian.
>
> I'm really not. I'm pointing out that for a lot of teams, that literally
> *does not matter at all*. Absolutely nothing changes about the
> maintenance status of many team-maintained packages if the person who last
> worked on that package disappears.
>
> Teams often don't notice that someone is MIA because *it doesn't matter*
> for their workflow; they're happy to have people come and go.
When all members of a team are confirmed to be MIA/retired,
this should result in an orphaning of all packages maintained
by the team.
> > You are assuming that the team has a non-zero number of active members
> > left after a member becomes MIA.
>
> No, I'm not -- as I pointed out in a separate message, this is a problem
> worth solving, but this is an MIA team problem that I think is best
> tackled from that angle. If all of a team's packages are bitrotting, then
> the team's packages should be orphaned just like we do with an MIA single
> maintainer.
This would create both longer bitrot for packages and more work for
an already overworked team.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
