On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 05:39:38PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > > "Collaborative maintenance should not be mandatory (we do have > > several very efficient one-man-band developers), but should be our > > default". <snip> > What I would do if the times will come, is to get in touch with NM > people. My proposal would be to add a "join a team" entry as one of > the *recommended* step in our join checklists.
Let me add a second way to implement that default; I've split it in a
different mail because it touches a different subject: handling of
sub-standard quality packages. We need ways to identify them and to,
initially gently and then more forcibly if needed, encourage
maintainers to pass over maintenance. How to do that is a different
topic, let's assume we have a way to identify such packages.
In such scenario, the first choice should be to look whether we
already have a team maintaining related packages and get actively in
touch with them to check whether there are people in the team willing
to take over maintenance. The second choice should be an attempt to
create a team for the maintenance of the package, possibly federating
together related packages. FWIW, that's how I got involved in several
of the teams I'm a member of: responding to cries for help together
with other. If all this fails, we should then put the package up for
adoption as we currently do.
Finally, I believe our most important packages (e.g., as defined by
their archive Priority or shared libraries with tons of reverse
dependencies) should be team-maintained, at least to provide backup
maintainers. In fact, the PTS already implements such a warning on a
Priority basis (implementation by Raphael, a while ago); similar
warnings can and should be added to other tools of our toolchains.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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