On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 at 08:54 Stefano Rivera <stefa...@debian.org> wrote:
> There's a fundamental question to ask here. Do we want to welcome Python > packages into the team, or do we want to put up barriers and require a > level of commitment before packages can be brought into the team? Speaking for myself, I welcome anybody working on 'my' packages. As in making changes to subversion/git or even uploading packages. Sure mistakes can happen, packages might even become broken, however I think the risks of packages going unmaintained is far more damaging. I had several packages or mine fail to get into Jessie, because of trivial release critical bugs in dependent packages, and the official maintainer ignored the bug reports. I believe this is why we have team maintainers - so anybody can work on the packages. Yes - I could have also done an immediate NMU - however not being the maintainer I wasn't aware of the release critical bug until the packages had been removed and it was too late to do anything - the release team wouldn't let one package back in despite the fact the only bug was a problem with the copyright file. My impression is that it is a minority that get upset when people upload 'their' packages to the Debian archive without asking for permission first. I think these people tend to be active developers, so maybe these maintainers should be treated as special cases? My understanding - correct me if I am wrong - is that nobody has ever complained about committing changes to subversion/git. Which rather puzzles me that Thomas Goirand was removed from DPMT and PAPT - I believe (am I mistaken?) this removes his ability to commit changes to subversion (which was OK), but not remove his ability to upload packages (which was not always OK). > On the other hand, if we raise barriers, we reduce the size and > influence of the team. The few packages we maintain, we can probably > maintain to a higher standard. Maybe there'd be less bickering, because > we'd be working together more (not that I think we have much). > Newcomers would be rarer (there's a commitment) but more valuable to the > team. Or would we start to attract people faster because of our level of > activity? > With fewer packages in the team, we would end up with more packages being out-of-date and poorly maintained. This would lead to even more people installing packages directly using pip, and Debian packaging would become less relevant for Python developers.
