I had an idea this morning while working through the Policy backlog and wanted to see if others think it's worth pursuing.
One of the challenges of some Policy changes is that there can be subtle nuances that aren't obvious. We currently rely on the seconding process to ensure that at least a few people have had eyes on any given change, but that's at the mercy of whoever happens to be reading debian-policy. Thankfully, many long-time Debian contributors have been willing to keep up with the list, but Debian is busy and traffic can be bursty and that may not always be the best use of their time. The IETF has a concept of expert review for certain types of changes, and the Linux kernel and other projects use subsystem maintainers to route patch reviews to appropriate people. I'm wondering if Policy would benefit from a similar sort of concept: maintaining a list of expert reviewers. The idea would look something like this: * We would keep a list of general Policy areas and a corresponding list of Debian experts in that area in a file in the debian-policy source package (but not part of the binary package or published on the web site). Or we put it in the wiki, but I'm trying to reduce the number of places people's email addresses get published for spamming purposes (probably futilely). * If something in that area comes up, the Debian Policy Editors would cc the experts in that area once there's a concrete proposal or patch that's ready for review. * Anyone who feels like they have deep expertise in an area of Debian and wants to be listed can just ask us and we'll add them. This wouldn't be a blocking review necessarily, since people are busy and sometimes there are expert disagreements that we still have to sort out. But the point would be to make sure the people with the highest-quality input would have an opportunity to see any change. Obviously this wouldn't be necessary for areas of Policy work that mostly correspond to a single package. In those cases (libc, for example), we should just copy the package maintainers. But there are a lot of fuzzier areas, like bootstrapping, the maintainer script execution model, shared library dependencies, the Perl policy, debconf, and so forth where I know there are domain experts in Debian but we don't have a systematic way of involving them in patch review. If all those folks are happy to read debian-policy, this is sort of pointless. I'm guessing that's not the case, but I don't really know. Guillem can also decide if he wants to be an expert reviewer on most of Policy. :) What do people think? Helpful innovation, or just extra bookkeeping that isn't worth the effort? If people do think this is a good idea, I'll bring it up on debian-devel for further discussion (and then, if we adopted it, it would be a debian-devel-announce post). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
