Didier Raboud wrote: > What most respondents have gotten across as the bulk of my proposal seems to be: "we could limit upload rights to certain packages" > > ... where what I was trying to get across was: "we could team-maintain the core of Debian (and by extension, other subsets)"
Frankly, reading your original message, most of it seemed indeed to revolve around the former, with "remove the source-package-level realms" dropped in as a somewhat casual note near the end. I suspected that that was your real focus (and already replied to that), but it wasn't that clear. > The problem I'm trying to describe (and therefore the mitigations/solutions I put up for discussion) is that source package realms are not the right granularity for Debian development anymore. As I understand it, you may not be looking for the right "package granularity" so much as you're looking for the right "developer granularity". If the problem is that the maintainer of some package isn't collaborating -- specifically, refuses to apply a particular patch -- it doesn't really matter whether maintainership rights are assigned at single package level or at another level. What matters is that you don't want to have a single maintainer who can exercise veto power. Larger "package realms" would probably be maintained by more people, so that would indeed generate the intended effect, but as a more or less accidental byproduct of a larger change that might have other undesired consequences (specifically, several posters have expressed the concern that this might be detrimental to developer motivation). I'd prefer a proposal that addresses directly the specific issue. In fact, I even wonder whether your proposal would actually solve anything. In Debian, people only do the work that they want to do. If you want to add more maintainers to a package and can't find volunteers, you might work around that by "promoting" maintainers of related packages to co-maintainers of the whole realm. But what will happen in most cases is that the promotion will remain written on the (electronic) paper -- most people will just keep working on their packages like they've always been doing, will never exercise their co-maintainer powers, and will probably decline to be involved in any dispute that might arise over a package that happens to be "in their realm" but that they have no direct interest in. That said, there is some merit to the proposal of a "core team" that collectively maintains a set of "core packages". There are already delegated teams that maintains key parts of Debian -- release team, FTP team, installer team, etc. -- so I suppose that a "core team" would be a nice addition (pending a good round of yak-shaving over the name). But let's not forget that all existing teams have formed by *voluntary* aggregation and their members generally choose whom to work with. Trying to force the creation of a new team might not work well. For example, several years ago the DPL of the time forced the addition of a new FTP member. That resulted in the resignation of other members. Gerardo
